PM's foreign visits

They are planned well, but time now for action at home

Manners make the man, goes the old saying, but social media may well make the 21st century leader. Few global leaders personify this better than Prime Minister Narendra Modi. As his ongoing visit to the US attests, the prime minister is completely at ease in the new idiom of Twitter and Facebook and as well as in the company of the icons of the new information age – from a town hall meeting with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to a plant tour with Tesla’s Elon Musk. It helps also that both Google and Microsoft have personable Indian-born CEOs.  

Mr Modi’s style is presidential in a way that his predecessors as prime minister weren’t; he presses the flesh with aplomb in such engagements and poses for pictures frequently. He is also highly conscious of the message the adulation of the Indian diaspora and the red carpet rolled out by American CEOs send to his constituency back home. His town hall meeting with Facebook’s Mr Zuckerberg was brought forward (from the middle of the night India time) so that viewers in India were able to watch it. No other Indian prime minister in recent years has exploited his foreign visits to his advantage and built his image at home in a manner he has done. This superbly scripted trip with meetings in New York with 30 CEOs moderated by Fortune magazine, a session with Rupert Murdoch and other media executives and a veritable victory lap for Mr Modi  in Silicon Valley  also point to the fact that the prime minister travels with none of the socialist baggage of his predecessors.

Google, Facebook and Microsoft have pledged support for India’s efforts to bridge the digital divide; if half of what has been promised comes to fruition, these corporations will have gone a long way to achieving that goal. The Indian government will have to follow through, however, with clear policy guidelines for these multinationals. For the full benefits to flow through in terms of enhanced productivity, business opportunities and a boost for education for India’s young, raising the number of people in India’s villages, who have access to 24/7 electricity, is critical. Mr Modi’s boast of making India a $20-trillion economy will certainly not happen in his lifetime.

Here the past record suggests there are many a slip between public pronouncements overseas and the difficulties of doing business on the ground in India. In Mr Modi’s meeting with CEOs in New York, few pulled their punches. Undaunted, Mr Modi claimed in California that India’s ease of doing business ranking had improved under his watch; in fact it has slipped from 140 to 142. This may seem a small oversight, but it is all of a piece with a government that had recently issued a draft policy paper suggesting that citizens keep unencrypted records of every electronic communication for a period of 90 days only to back down after a public outcry; coherence and consistency in public policy are desperately needed. The late Rajiv Gandhi’s passion for technology translated into the explosive growth of the information technology business. Like Mr Modi, he was feted on visits to the US in the mid-1980s and shone under the spotlight, but much of India — and notably Indian governance — remained resolutely unchanged. Mr Modi must quickly move beyond the business of collecting Facebook likes — up by about 100,000 over this past weekend alone — and urgently tackle the challenge of making India business-friendly for small entrepreneurs and manufacturing and technology multinationals alike.