What Modi’s UK visit reveals and what it quietly ignores

THE red carpet is being unrolled. Invitations are being prepared. If all goes to plan, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will soon be photographed sipping tea with King Charles III, addressing a cheering diaspora crowd and signing the long-delayed UK-India trade deal that promises cheaper whisky in Delhi and smoother visa routes for Indian tech workers in Manchester.

This is history, we’re told — a landmark in relations between the world’s fifth and sixth largest economies. But what it really is, above all, is theatre: carefully scripted, immaculately stage-managed and designed to succeed.

At the expected state banquet, there will be no champagne toast. The Prime Minister is famously teetotal. The menu will avoid Britain’s national favourite — roast beef — cuisine that would trigger outrage among a vast section of Hindus worldwide. Instead, guests will dine on a strictly vegetarian spread, dressed up with diplomatic delicacy and fusion flourishes. The Brits are, as ever, brilliant hosts — even obsequious when occasion demands.

The visit itself falls neatly between Emmanuel Macron’s Bastille Day-themed charm offensive and Donald Trump’s expected UK appearance later this year. But there’s more meaning in the places Modi won’t visit than in the handshakes he will offer.

He will not walk up the Clive Steps outside the Foreign Office — named after Robert Clive, who looted Bengal, founded the East India Company’s military rule and built the fortune that funded generations of British stately homes. Clive’s statue still stands nearby, largely unbothered by protest or plaque.

He will avoid Pentonville Prison, still standing and still in use, where Udham Singh was hanged in 1940 for assassinating Michael O’Dwyer, the former Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, in revenge for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Nor will he remember Madan Lal Dhingra, who was executed at the very same prison in 1909 for the assassination of Curzon Wyllie in London — one of the earliest acts of armed resistance against the British Empire carried out on British soil. Dhingra’s trial was swift, his execution discreet, and his body buried in prison grounds — only repatriated to India decades later.

He will also not visit Brighton’s Royal Pavilion, where Indian soldiers wounded in the First World War were segregated from white patients to preserve colonial hierarchies even in convalescence. Nor will he step inside Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, which until 2020 displayed human skulls from India, a practice only recently ended amid criticism of colonial collecting habits.

Above all, the Prime Minister is unlikely to set foot in the British Museum, where an exhibition titled ‘Ancient India: Living Traditions‘ is now on display. Visitors are invited to experience darshan — the sacred act of seeing and being seen by the divine — while incense wafts gently and Sanskrit chants play softly in the background.

What the exhibition does not explain is how the museum acquired these objects — not through partnership or preservation, but through plunder. Statues, coins, manuscripts and ritual tools lie behind glass, labelled as cultural treasures but stripped of historical context. No mention is made of conquest, appropriation or the often violent processes that brought these “living traditions" to Bloomsbury.

Among these items are not just statues and manuscripts but also human remains, including from India. The British Museum, like several institutions across the UK, continues to hold skeletal material taken during colonial expeditions, stored in vaults far from the lands and communities they were removed from. These, too, are part of the silent legacy Modi will not confront.

Some years ago, a former curator at the British Museum told me of a particular idol — a religious statue believed to depict Shiva and Parvati — that had once been used as a makeshift cricket stump here in the UK by members of the English family who had previously owned it. At the time, the statue lay uncatalogued in the museum’s storage. Its form — narrow, weathered, vaguely anthropomorphic — made it convenient for impromptu matches on the lawn. Today, it rests behind glass in a climate-controlled case, accompanied by a respectful label. The cricket match, and the casual desecration it involved, goes unmentioned.

The absence of any official Indian comment on this display is unsurprising. Diplomatic visits are built on consensus, not confrontation. And Modi, who knows how to command a crowd and control a narrative, is unlikely to undermine a trip designed to project power, certainty and international respect.

Back home, his political base will see the London visit as proof of India’s rising global stature. Here in Britain, the government — reeling from economic drift and diplomatic stasis — will present the trade deal as proof that post-Brexit Britain still matters. It is, as ever, a choreography of mutual self-interest.

The Prime Minister will be greeted as a modern statesman and a strategic partner. His visit will underscore growing economic ties and shared global ambitions. Yet, much will go unspoken, including the deeper histories contained in museums, prisons and memorials across Britain.

That, too, seems by design.

Perhaps, the only spontaneous moment will come if diaspora crowds gather — jubilant, unfiltered, full of pride. In previous visits, Modi has drawn stadium-sized audiences in Wembley, Houston and New York. The symbolism will be rich: a leader once unwelcome in this country now embraced with full honours. That shift speaks volumes — not just about India’s rising stature but also about how Britain chooses to remember, and what it still prefers to forget.

Shyam Bhatia is the London Correspondent, The Tribune.

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