Narendra Modi Quotes
I will only say that many freedom fighters of India found their calling in the institutions of Britain. And many makers of modern India, including several of my distinguished predecessors, from Jawaharlal Nehru to Dr. Manmohan Singh, passed through their doors.
Modi, Narendra. Address to the UK Parliament. London, 12 Nov. 2015.
This is another example of how President Roosevelt conducted his own international diplomacy independent of his own State Department. At the time, the U. S. State Department would not have any contact with Nehru who was in and out of British Indian jails for his anti-Colonial agitating. Roosevelt, however was a great admirer of Nehru and the Congress party and the commitment to democracy, freedom of religion, speech and the press and civil rights. Roosevelt and the American military strategic leaders were beginning to worry that China, even with help, would not be able to hold off the Japanese aggression, and India would become a frontier for the Allied war effort. The President realized that Nehru and his Congress Party were pressuring England for independence and extreme Indian nationalists were advocating non-support of the British military effort and strikes and protests to bog down the British army dealing with them instead of fighting the Japanese in Burma and elsewhere. There were a large number of Indian Brigades fighting for the British and if the Indian military volunteers were to be discouraged or boycotted, the allied war effort would suffer. So the President's style was to personally see what he could contribute over and above (and often to the distress of) his agencies established to do the job.
Narendra Damodardas Modi is an Indian politician serving as the 14th and current Prime Minister of India since 2014. He was the Chief Minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014 and is the Member of Parliament for Varanasi. Modi is a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its National Democratic Alliance (NDA). He is also a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist volunteer organisation. He is the first prime minister born after India's independence, the second non-Congress one to win two consecutive terms after Atal Bihari Vajpayee and the first from outside the Congress to win both terms with a majority in the Lok Sabha.
