Narendra Modi’s Foreign Travel not to Blame

Live Mint

29 December 2015

Dhruva Jaishankar

Prime Minister Narendra Modi may have fulfilled his predecessor Manmohan Singh’s wish and had breakfast in Kabul, lunch in Lahore and dinner at home in Delhi (even if he reversed the intended order). But don’t you know, Delhi is not his home. I also hear that he has become eligible to open an NRI (non-resident Indian) bank account. And rumour has it that he received an invitation to the next Pravasi Bharatiya Divas conference.

You’ve probably heard some variation of these poor jokes about the prime minister over the past year and a half. It has become a common refrain among critics on social media and in the country’s newspaper opinion pages that Modi spends far too much time outside the country while neglecting his domestic responsibilities. Even the Financial Times recently decided to pile on, reporting that investors were tired of Modi “spending too much time abroad while the domestic economy is allowed to drift”. To some extent, the perception is an outcome of the high-visibility diaspora events in which the prime minister participates on his foreign travels—from Madison Square Garden to Wembley Stadium—as well as his penchant for showmanship, whether attempting archery in Mongolia or dropping in for the birthday of Nawaz Sharif, his Pakistani counterpart.

But the line of criticism that the prime minister’s foreign jaunts are somehow responsible for his domestic shortcomings is misplaced. For one thing, Modi’s travel has not been particularly inordinate by the standards of his counterparts in other countries—or even his predecessor. In 2015, he visited 25 countries and spent a total of 53 days travelling abroad. By comparison, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe—like Modi, a relatively young leader believed to have brought diplomatic vigour to his office—visited 23 countries, including Jamaica, Ukraine and Jordan, and spent 58 days on tour. China’s President Xi Jinping was no slouch either, managing visits to 14 countries over 42 days this year, including some as far afield as Zimbabwe and Belarus. To draw another comparison, during the first year of his second term as prime minister, Modi’s predecessor Manmohan Singh travelled for 47 days to 12 countries. Basically, Modi’s busy travel schedule in 2015—which still kept him at home roughly 85% of the time—is no longer particularly out of the ordinary for the leader of a major state.

… Dhruva Jaishankar is a fellow with the German Marshall Fund in Washington and a visiting fellow with the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

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Last updated on 14/01/2016