Rishi Sunak's Post On PM Modi, India After Attending NDTV World Summit 2025

Former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has praised India's "energy and ambition" and described the India-UK partnership as "hugely promising for the future," after attending the NDTV World Summit 2025 in New Delhi.

In a social media post following the event, Sunak wrote: "It was a pleasure to join the NDTV World Summit in New Delhi and reconnect with my good friend @narendramodi. We spoke about the challenges and opportunities shaping the decade ahead, from AI and infrastructure to global growth and economic resilience. India's energy and ambition are unmistakable. As new ideas and industries emerge, there's huge potential for deeper partnerships between countries like the UK and India in business, technology and education."

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The post followed his appearance at the two-day summit, where Sunak discussed globalisation, the recently concluded India-UK trade agreement, and the growing importance of cooperation in an era of geopolitical uncertainty.

Speaking at a session moderated by NDTV's CEO and Editor-in-Chief Rahul Kanwal, Senior Managing Editor Vishnu Som, and Managing Editor Padmaja Joshi, the former British PM said the world he grew up in "no longer exists."

"The old global order, or globalisation, that I grew up with, which came into place after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that is gone, and I don't think it is coming back," Sunak said.

He argued that the coming decade would be defined by "multipolarity and domestic capabilities", with India serving as a clear example of both. "There will be more multipolarity in the world - and India is an example of that - and the second thing is that countries everywhere are focused much more on domestic capabilities," he said.

Sunak pointed to the Covid-19 pandemic as a key moment that reshaped governments' approach to self-reliance.

"Covid was not just a health crisis; it was a geopolitical event," he noted. "Every country suddenly realised the fragility of their supply chains."

Turning to global trade and strategic competition, Sunak said that China's approach to economic engagement had forced democracies to reconsider traditional trade norms.

"It is clear China does not play by the same rules that many of the rest of us were playing by. They don't view trade purely as an economic function," he remarked. "Countries have had to think about security, intellectual property theft, and strategic dependency alongside trade. That's why the UK and several others banned Huawei equipment and passed new national security Acts."

Sunak served as the UK's first prime minister of Indian origin between October 2022 and July 2024.

Born in Southampton in 1980, Sunak's grandparents migrated from British India to East Africa and later to the United Kingdom in the 1960s. He is married to Akshata Murthy, the daughter of Infosys founder Narayana Murthy and philanthropist-turned-MP Sudha Murty.