Boris Johnson is a patsy for populist leaders – as his India visit shows | Mukul Kesavan

By posing in a digger just after Muslim properties had been razed, Johnson is enabling Modi's nationalist policies

Boris Johnson belongs in a Bombay film. In a photo from his recent India visit he's pictured leaning out of the cab of a yellow excavator in a JCB factory with all the swagger of Shammi Kapoor hanging out of a moving train in the 1962 classic film Professor. There's the same pudgy flair, the same willingness to be ridiculous in the cause of charm, and the same blithe disregard for time and place.

The day before Johnson landed in Ahmedabad, seven of these JCB diggers had been used to raze Muslim shops and homes, and the gate of a mosque in New Dehli's Jahangirpuri area, in defiance of a supreme court stay on demolition. The municipality that ordered the demolitions was run by the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), and the brazen disregard of the apex court's orders seemed almost staged for television.

Mukul Kesavan is an essayist and author who teaches history at Jamia Millia Islamia university in New Delhi