By T N Ashok
There is a photograph that has, by now, become a genre unto itself: Narendra Modi, garlanded or embracing, disembarking from an Air India One flight onto a red carpet somewhere between Washington and Abu Dhabi, Tokyo and Rio. Multiply that image by 102 and you have the defining visual record of India’s most travelled prime minister — a leader who, as of June 2026, has undertaken 102 international trips to 81 countries since 2014, eclipsing even Indira Gandhi’s well-worn passport.
The question Indian taxpayers are increasingly entitled to ask is not whether Mr Modi has travelled a great deal. That is beyond dispute. It is whether the republic has received value commensurate with the spectacle — or whether twelve years of summit diplomacy amount, in large part, to an expensively produced foreign-policy travelogue.
The bill, finally itemised: For years, the government resisted a consolidated accounting of what all this cost. That changed in February 2026, when the Ministry of External Affairs, responding to a written question in the Lok Sabha, disclosed that the Prime Minister’s foreign trips between 2015 and 2025 had cost the exchequer ₹762 crore. The trajectory is instructive: annual spending crossed ₹100 crore in 2024 and then ₹175 crore in 2025, a year of marathon touring across Europe, the Americas, Africa and East Asia. Delegation sizes have swelled too, ranging from 27 to 72 officials per trip, with one five-nation tour in 2025 requiring 95 accompanying personnel.
The MEA’s defence — that host nations absorb most hospitality costs, leaving India to fund security, delegation logistics and the media contingent — is technically accurate and beside the point. ₹762 crore is not a rounding error in a country where state governments routinely plead poverty over midday-meal budgets and drought relief. The real question was never the accounting line. It is the return on it.
Has the diplomacy actually paid off? Any honest audit must concede that some of this travel produced hard outcomes. The India-UAE Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, signed in 2022, has demonstrably deepened trade and drawn the UAE into the top rank of India’s strategic investors — arguably the single cleanest success of the Modi diplomatic era. Washington has delivered the GE-HAL jet engine collaboration, expanding semiconductor cooperation and deeper intelligence-sharing arrangements, even if several of these remain mid-implementation rather than complete. The Quad, dismissed by sceptics a decade ago as a talking shop, has hardened into a genuine strategic platform binding India to the United States, Japan and Australia. France has moved past Rafale jets into space and civil nuclear cooperation. These are not nothing.
But set against this ledger is a longer list of ambitions still gathering dust. The Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train, promised as a flagship of the Japan relationship, remains years behind its original schedule. The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, unveiled with considerable fanfare at the 2023 G20 summit as a rival to China’s Belt and Road, has been becalmed by the very regional instability — the Gaza war, and now the aftermath of the 2026 Iran-US conflict — that a corridor through West Asia was supposed to insure against. Infrastructure MoUs signed with African and Latin American governments have, by the government’s own admissions in various parliamentary replies, progressed at a crawl.
This is the structural chink in India’s diplomatic model: an MoU is a statement of intent, not a contract. Signing one generates a headline and a handshake photograph; delivering on it requires financing to be arranged, environmental clearances to be secured, land to be acquired, and — most often the fatal step — private capital to actually show up. Indian and foreign officials involved in past summit preparations have long acknowledged privately that investment figures announced at events such as Vibrant Gujarat or the Voice of the Global South summits are aspirational ceilings, not realised totals, and that the gap between the number announced on stage and the capital actually deployed years later is rarely reconciled in public.
Mr Modi did not invent the diaspora rally or the leader-to-leader hug. But he industrialised them. Howdy Modi in Houston, the toffee-sharing moment with Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, the carefully choreographed embraces with leader after leader — these are not accidents of scheduling. They are the product of a deliberate communications strategy that treats foreign policy as a permanent campaign, engineered for the diaspora WhatsApp forward and the primetime split-screen as much as for any cable traffic between foreign ministries.
There is a legitimate argument that this branding has value: it projects confidence, signals that India is a nation worth courting, and generates diaspora goodwill that translates, eventually, into remittances and investment. There is an equally legitimate counter-argument that it has become a substitute for negotiating leverage — that the hug has, on occasion, been mistaken for the outcome.
Whatever the balance sheet on individual partnerships, some structural Indian weaknesses have proven immune to prime ministerial mileage. Trade with China continues to expand even as the two armies remain locked in an unresolved Himalayan standoff. India’s bid for a permanent UN Security Council seat is exactly where it was in 2014 — a perennial talking point, never a vote. And the pattern of announcement-heavy, delivery-light diplomacy has repeated itself closely enough, across enough summits, that it can no longer be dismissed as an occasional lapse.
The verdict: None of this means Indian diplomacy under Narendra Modi has failed. Judged by the UAE, by the Quad, by the deepening of the American relationship, there is a genuine case that India’s global standing is materially stronger than it was in 2014. But judged by the government’s own preferred metric — the sheer volume of visits, countries and signed documents — the honest answer is that quantity has consistently outpaced verified delivery, and no government agency publishes the consolidated implementation audit that would let citizens check the two against each other.
That absence is, in the end, the real story. A democracy that spends ₹762 crore and counting on prime ministerial travel is entitled to more than a photograph and a press release. It is entitled to a ledger — country by country, MoU by MoU — showing what was promised, what was delivered, and what quietly died in a drawer in some ministry between summits. Until that ledger exists, every claim of diplomatic triumph, and every accusation of diplomatic theatre, will remain equally unfalsifiable. For a government that prides itself on data-driven governance at home, the silence on data-driven diplomacy abroad is its own kind of answer. (IPA Service)
