It was 6°C outside Marvel Stadium in Melbourne on Thursday night, but inside, nearly 30,000 people were generating their own heat. Giant mandalas glowed behind the stage, and the red carpet stretched improbably long. When Narendra Modi walked out beside Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, the arena did not so much applaud as detonate.
Albanese, who has hosted Bruce Springsteen at the same venue, joked that even ‘The Boss’ hadn’t seen a reception quite like this one. Chants of “Modi, Modi, Modi” collided with an Australian sporting refrain “Oi! Oi! Oi!” This was the Melbourne leg of Modi’s latest three-nation tour of Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand—one unmistakable style, road-tested across more than a hundred foreign visits to around 100 nations since 2014. It’s a record unmatched by any Indian Prime Minister before him.
What sets apart Modiplomacy is not merely its volume, but its geography and grammar. Where American, Russian, Chinese and many European leaders have historically circled a familiar loop of Washington, Moscow, Beijing, London, Paris and Tokyo, Modi has, by design, repeatedly stepped off it. He became the first Indian PM to visit Israel, Palestine, Mongolia, Rwanda, and, weeks before this trip, Slovakia since its independence.
He has traveled to Fiji, Seychelles, Mauritius, Papua New Guinea, Trinidad and Tobago—nations that rarely feature on major-power itineraries, yet host sizeable populations of Indian origin. Everywhere, a connecting line keeps surfacing. It’s about retrieval of a diaspora no previous PM had systematically courted—in Houston’s ‘Howdy Modi’ rally and now in a sold-out Docklands arena in Melbourne, where he told the crowd their weekends of bhajan-clubbing and backyard cricket proved a life built abroad and an identity rooted in India need not contradict each other.
Layered onto that geography is a more personal grammar than statecraft’s usual communiqués and restrained handshakes. The Modihuglomacy—extended to leaders from Barack Obama to Emmanuel Macron—is now so recognisable that foreign media outlets anticipate it as a symbolic gesture. Gestures like unveiling a two-decade-old photograph of himself with former Australian captain Steve Waugh at the Melbourne Cricket Ground this week, a memento from when Modi was still Gujarat’s Chief Minister, define Modi’s style.
Numbers, too, have entered the repertoire, deployed as literal equations rather than abstract talk of “connection”. In Jakarta, Modi told the Indian community that Republic Day, January 26, could be read as 2+6=8, echoing President Prabowo Subianto’s own milestones, a flourish that didn’t quite land since Republic Day is an annual event, not the “last year” event his arithmetic implied. Opposition parties mocked it as gimmickry. In Melbourne, he reached for a different sum, describing the India-Australia relationship as 1+1=11, insisting the partnership was not merely additive but exponential. He called this trip his “hat-trick” in Australia, urging the diaspora to “hit fours and sixes” for their adopted country, reaching for a metaphor his audience lives inside.
Strip away the choreography and the visits still carry a dense agenda: 16 agreements in Jakarta spanning defence and space cooperation between Isro and Indonesia’s BRIN, a decade-stalled uranium deal and expanded defence roadmap in Melbourne, and talks in Auckland building on this year’s India-New Zealand trade agreement. Modi now holds more than three-dozen international civilian honours—Indonesia’s Bintang Adipurna the latest—making him India’s most internationally decorated PM.
Opposition leaders argue the travels came at cost of roughly Rs 762 crore over a decade. But the bigger picture is arithmetic before charisma. India, a nation of 1.4 billion people, is the fastest-growing major economy on the planet. When Modi lands in Melbourne, Jakarta or Berlin, he facilitates access to Indian consumers and a multimillion-strong diaspora.
That leverage buys latitude: a PM whose country other governments need something from can set the terms of his own reception—for one, a stadium instead of a banquet hall. Host governments build itineraries around the informality rather than merely tolerating it. Albanese’s office organised the 30,000-seat stadium event. The mayor of Nice ordered India’s tricolour flown over the city hall, a courtesy rarely extended to visiting dignitaries. None of this sits in any protocol handbook; it exists because hosts have concluded that meeting Modi on his own terms is worth more than insisting he meet them on theirs.
Prabhu Chawla
prabhuchawla@newindianexpress.com
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