German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Sunday visited the grounds of the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket team Royal Challengers Bangalore during the second day of his trip to India.
Scholz met with officials and players from the men’s and women’s teams at the Chinnaswamy stadium in the southern city of Bengaluru and was presented with a signed cricket bat.
The visit to India’s tech hub came a day after Scholz met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss sealing a free trade deal between India and the European Union (EU).
Scholz is also pushing hard for a $5.2 billion deal to sell India six conventional submarines. However, this latest attempt by a Western military manufacturing power to wean New Delhi away from its dependence on Russia for military hardware is not expected to yield an immediate result.
Germany’s pivot to India is particularly stark, given the importance of close economic ties to China, the main buyer of German machine tools, and Russia, its key energy supplier, to German prosperity over the past 15 years.
