Opinion | How PM Modi Made Foreign Policy A Domestic Product

PM Modi gave foreign policy a permanent home in Indian public life, with a vocabulary, a sense of nationalistic pride and rituals that ordinary citizens could join year after year.

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On 28 September 2014, four months after taking office, Narendra Modi stepped onto a revolving stage at Madison Square Garden before about 18,000 Indian-Americans who had won free tickets in a lottery. He spoke in Hindi for more than an hour, and that choice of language reached a far larger audience watching on Indian television that Sunday night, showing that India’s place in the world now belonged to them as well.

That evening in New York worked so well at home that it became a tradition. At Houston’s NRG Stadium in September 2019, the crowd reached about 50,000, and the President of the United States stood beside the Indian prime minister and walked the stadium with him.

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In Sydney in May 2023, Anthony Albanese introduced Modi at Qudos Bank Arena by comparing the reception to one Bruce Springsteen had received there and calling Modi the boss.

Two months later, Modi addressed the diaspora at La Seine Musicale in Paris on the eve of a Bastille Day parade, where Indian troops marched down the Champs-Élysées as guests of honour.

Each of those evenings reached millions of homes in India within hours, and an Indian watching in Patna or Coimbatore saw the leaders of the world’s great democracies treating his country as an equal.

Earlier prime ministers had their moments when foreign policy reached the public. Delhi’s streets filled for Zhou Enlai in 1954, and Indira Gandhi swept the state........

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