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The Big Picture: Change of climate
A little over a year ago, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood in front of a crowd of 50,000 people in a stadium in Houston, Texas, just as the US election turbing was whirring up. “Ab ki baar, Trump sarkar,” he declared, meaning roughly, “this time, it’s Trump’s turn”. The phrase was an adaptation of Modi’s own electoral campaign slogan, one that Trump had himself used in an ad targeted at Indian-American voters in 2016.
Its significance was undeniable. Modi’s team would later scramble to insist that the Indian prime minister had not endorsed Trump ahead of the 2020 elections. Yet it was impossible to see the choice of that phrase, and indeed the entire “Howdy Modi” event followed by a repeat “Namaste Trump” performance in India earlier this year as anything but a tacit endorsement of the Republican candidate.
The Houston event in particular did three things:
- Offered a reminder of how popular Modi still was among the diaspora, whose...
