Just a week into his second term in office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is ‘back on the road yet again’! With a series of both domestic and foreign trips—to the Maldives, Sri Lanka—lined up, and complete with a temple run down south, the prime minister seems to be picking up from where he left off in his previous term.
In 2014, when he assumed office, ‘Prime Ministerial Trips’ were largely just the mundane nine-minute drive from 7, Race Course Road to the Secretariat Building; anything more was a luxury. But five years on, there have been epochal changes. The PM’s so called ‘trips’ now involve long air hauls, and daunting helicopter adventures into remote terrain. It is now evident that Modi is very much an outdoors man who loves to take his files across the oceans. Interestingly, this style of running the country can put a prime minister not just back in power but can do so with an even greater mandate.
Visiting a whopping 92 countries across six continents in 48 foreign trips in a single term, is unheard of in case of an Indian prime minister. But then, it is Modi we are talking about. 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. After just a year in office, Modi was dubbed a 'globetrotter’ prime minister. But this title became an understatement, as, by 2019, he completed 328 official domestic trips alongside the travels abroad.
Personal diplomacy is his hallmark. His approach has won him both brickbats and accolades. In a country struggling to cope with its worst agrarian crisis, a prime minister spending more than Rs 2,021 crore in five years does not go down well with his critics. His supporters, on the other hand, claim that his trips have resulted in notable foreign policy gains.
On a lighter note, it is safe to say that our prime minister would make a great ‘travel show host’—an idea his tweets are sure to confirm. Having seen the best of the 92 countries he has visited as state head, his citizens might as well take some valuable advice from him when they are planning a trip abroad.
But, as for the prime minister and his team, the travel globe-trotting will go on for at least the next five years. Thanks to the new government’s “neighbour-first policy”, multiple trips to India’s immediate neighbours is given. And with the diplomat-turned-foreign-minister, S. Jaishankar, joining in for another set of diplomatic missions parallel to Modi’s, there will be no dearth of foreign trips in this new government's tenure.
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, thus paving the way for ‘institutional patriotism’ in India, too. Criticism might not be a deterrent for this government. Whether these expensive expeditions would ever be sacrificed for compelling domestic issues is something only time can tell.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author's and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK
