Just a week after his second term in office commenced, Prime Minister Modi is ‘back on the road yet again’! With a series of both foreign and domestic trips lined up to the Maldives, Sri Lanka and complete with a temple run down south, the prime minister is certainly starting again from where he left off in his previous term.
Back in 2014, when he assumed office, ‘Prime Ministerial Trips’ were largely just the mundane 7-minute drive from the RCR (Lok Kalyan Marg) to the Secretariat; anything more was but a Luxury. But five years later, things have certainly changed and how epochal has it been! The PM’s so called ‘trips’ now involve long air hauls, and daunting helicopter adventures into remote terrain. It is evident that India’s most popular leader is very much an outdoors man who loves to take his files across the oceans and much to the surprise of almost everybody else, this style of running the country can seemingly put a prime minister not just back in power but can do so with an even greater mandate.
Visiting 92 countries across 6 continents in 48 foreign trips within a single term, is not usually what an Indian prime minister gets associated with. But then there is Narendra Modi. Absorbing the MEA almost entirely into the PMO and spanning the latitudes and longitudes of the globe and being absent in New Delhi nearly every other day in 2015 is quite unorthodox to start off with. After just a year in office, Prime Minster Modi was dubbed with the title of being “a ‘Globetrotter’ Prime Minister”. But this title would eventually be regarded an understatement, as by 2019 the prime minister would have completed a total of 328 official domestic trips alongside the travels abroad.
If the prime minister’s travels are news that is getting too banal for one’s years, well then just so you know, he is up and gallivanting all over again, the elections probably just restricting him to domestic campaign trips.
With personal diplomacy as the name of his game, this approach has won him both brickbats and remarkable accolades with some of them being the highest civilian awards in some nations. In a country struggling to cope up with its worst ever agrarian crisis that continues to see farmer suicides as a daily occurrence, a PM spending more than Rs 2000 crore for travel in five years surely does not go down well with his critics. His supporters on the other hand, would claim all day long that his trips have indeed resulted in foreign policy gains.
Nevertheless of the mere divisions of opinion, the travel show will go on at least for the next five years, with the new government’s “neighbour-first policy” doing the rounds, multiple trips to India’s immediate neighbours is anybody’s guess. And with diplomat-turned-foreign minister, S. Jaishankar joining in for another set of voyages parallel to Modi’s, we can be sure that there will be no dearth of foreign trips in this new government.
From coffee table books chronicling the PM’s foreign trips to an all new state-of-the-art ‘Air India one’ upgrading in the hangar, the ‘optics’ of these travels will only get better paving the way for ‘institutional patriotism’. Whether this is glamorous for many or not so inspiring for some is not a worthy enough deterrent for the government yet. But until then, this is the story of India’s versatile democratic functioning and the people that chart its destiny. Diplomacy or ‘Hug-plomacy’ not withstanding, whether these expensive trips would ever give way to domestic issues is something only time can tell.
