Amid presidential election season, Modi to visit the US
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to visit the United States in September. He will address a major Indian community event in New York on September 22 and is also expected to address the UN General Assembly on September 26. The official purpose of Modi’s visit is to attend the Summit of the Future, a flagship event being organized by the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in his final year in the position.
Around 15,000 people are expected to attend the gathering of the Indian community. The community event is being organized by the Indian-American Diaspora Association (IADA). The event’s theme is ‘Modi & US: Progress Together’. The aim of the event is to celebrate India and the US and the “cultural ethos” of viewing the “world as one family, diversity a strength, and the well-being of all people and the planet an inspiration for building a better world together”. As the event is being planned in the middle of the American election season, in a departure from the past, organizers intend to keep it avowedly non-political. “There will be no elected officials invited for the event this time,” said one of the organizers of the event.
This is the fifth time Modi will address the Indian community in the US at an event. In 2014, he spoke at the Madison Square Garden in New York. In 2015, he addressed Indians in California’s San Jose with a focus on the tech community in Silicon Valley and the political leadership on the West Coast. In 2017, Modi spoke to community organization leaders at a smaller event in Washington DC. In 2019, a year before the last presidential elections, Modi and then-American President Donald Trump addressed the biggest-ever gathering of Indian-Americans in Houston, an event that drew criticism from Democrats who saw India as taking sides in the election, a perception that Delhi had to work hard to counter.
During his state visit to the US in 2023, 8000 Indian-Americans attended the ceremonial welcome at the White House itself while Modi spoke to Indian-American professionals at the Kennedy Center and addressed another community event in Reagan Center in Washington DC, both much smaller in scale.
This year, Modi’s event comes at a time when the American election has a strong Indian-American dimension. The Democratic nominee for the Presidency, Kamala Harris, identifies as both Black-American and Indian-American; her mother Shyamala Gopalan was a Tamil and migrated from India in 1958. The wife of the Republican nominee for vice president, J D Vance, is Usha Vance, daughter of immigrants from Andhra Pradesh.
Modi may also address the UN General Assembly on September 26, according to a provisional list of speakers for the general debate put out by the UN last month. Modi is also expected to have a range of bilateral meetings on the sidelines of the summit.
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