Who spoke well, who didn’t, it doesn’t matter, who they spoke to, perhaps, yes; but more importantly, this high-cost exercise cannot cover up the crisis of credibility which is the real problem.
Nobody is more mesmerised than the gullible Indians fed on a rightwing government-controlled narrative about the “grandiose and success” of a seven all-party delegation comprising 59 members total, with 31 political leaders from the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and 20 hand-picked politicians from opposition parties, supported by former diplomats.
These delegations were dispatched last week to about 33 countries, including UN Security Council members and European Union nations, as part of a political mission to strengthen India’s international outreach following Pahalgam attacks and the three-day skirmishes between India and Pakistan.
Their primary purpose is to convey India’s zero-tolerance stance against terrorism and mobilise global support for collective action against terrorism in all forms, while specifically calling for accountability from Pakistan accused of cross-border terrorism against India, said external affairs ministry while flagging off these delegations.
Ever since, there’s been much hair splitting over whether Kanimozhi Karunanidhi, leading the delegation to Russia and Eastern European countries with her clumsy “ers…and Umms” was a good choice or swooning over the impeccable English of the pedigreed Shashi Tharoor. Were the western audiences of any of these delegations impressed enough to respond and fulfill the stated goals of this mission?
It is naïve to believe so. There are three simple explanations to this.
Oratory is Only Optics
Firstly, diplomatic support and co-ordination is not built on plain rhetoric, optics and outreach but on mutual interests – economic, political and strategic.
Secondly, no country relies on information that is doled out by tailor-made visit of representatives from another country. In a world that is transparent and connected, they get better feedback from their embassies abroad and regular news feed which also probably informs each country about the ground realities of India including its excellence at manufacturing fake news – something that may fatten BJP’s vote bank but contributes immensely to India’s discredit.
Thirdly, any marginal success of foreign visits depends on who the audience is. The signs, so far in the public domain about the ongoing tour, are not very encouraging. According to various media reports in India, the Indian parliamentary delegations appear to have engaged primarily with relatively inconsequential figures and diaspora communities rather than high-level decision-makers in most countries.
While the delegations were tasked with meeting “ministers, MPs, lawmakers, think tanks, academics, journalists, and civil society,” the actual documented meetings reveal a pattern of engagement with mid-tier officials and community representatives.
The much-regaled delegation led by Shashi Tharoor, over which there has been some chest thumping, mainly interacted with Indian-diaspora, think-tank experts and media representatives at a consulate-hosted event, rather than senior U.S. government officials. It is not even known who these media representatives are. Some of the leading U.S. media organisations like the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN carried no or minimal reportage.
In Russia, while the delegation did meet Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko, most interactions were limited to journalists from various media outlets. While foreign media is largely blacking out the high profiled delegation, the Indian media consistently lack specific details about who these delegations actually met, beyond vague references to ‘political leaders’ in Slovenia or ‘dignitaries’ in South Korea, suggesting that many meetings may have been with lower-ranking officials or symbolic rather than substantive diplomatic engagements.
If the Indian delegation could not even secure an audience of the influential policy makers, it is as good as having an internal dialogue or making a good or bad speech at London’s Hyde Park or New York’s Time Square, where one can say what ones like, but nobody gives a damn.
So, is this exercise an extravagant fraud committed on the people of India?
Other than creating a feel-good factor within India, such delegations achieve nothing. India’s recent confrontation with Pakistan after the ‘Operation Sindoor’ should have served a lesson. It left India virtually friendless with even “my friend Trump” and his United States, whom India considers a significant and important ally, but it maintained equidistance from India and Pakistan. This despite the huge sums the country has invested in the optics-oriented foreign jaunts of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Cost of Foreign Tours
India has incurred substantial expenditure on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign visits over his tenure from 2014 to 2025. Based on official parliamentary disclosures and government statements, the estimated total expenditure amounts to approximately ₹3,677 crore (roughly $450-500 million USD), covering costs for chartered flights, aircraft maintenance, and communication facilities.
This rough estimate is based on partial disclosures made in the parliament from time to time. During the four-year period from June 2014 -2018, the government incurred expenditure of ₹2,021 crore, which included comprehensive costs for chartered flights, aircraft maintenance, and hotline facilities. A September 2020 Rajya Sabha reply indicated that ₹517.82 crore was spent on 58 country visits since 2015. This figure covered only chartered flight and hotline costs, excluding maintenance expenses, and overlapped with the earlier reporting period.
Based on a March 2020 Lok Sabha reply, ₹446.52 crore was spent over five years from 2015-16 to 2019-20. The annual distribution showed ₹121.85 crore in 2015-16, ₹78.52 crore in 2016-17, ₹99 crore in 2017-18, ₹100.02 crore in 2018-19, and ₹46.23 crore in 2019-20.
More recently, the government disclosed that ₹258 crore was spent on 38 foreign visits between 2022 and 2024, averaging ₹6.79 crore per trip. The most expensive single journey was the visit to the United States in June 2023, which cost over ₹22 crore.
Relation between Tours and Economy
While there has been much tom-tomming in India about how Modi’s foreign tours have enhanced the international image of India abroad and brought in Foreign Direct Investment and boosted India’s GDP, the reality is more nuanced.
India’s foreign direct investment landscape presents a paradoxical picture of robust gross inflows coupled with dramatic net outflow declines. In 2025, India has experienced a sharp 96.5% drop in net FDI to a record low of $353 million, down from $10 billion the previous year.
It is true that the decade following 2014 witnessed unprecedented FDI growth, with cumulative inflows but that had nothing to do with Modi’s foreign tours or his “jaddu ki jhappis” with his foreign counterparts. It was an ongoing trajectory since the previous decades.
The early phase of India’s FDI growth was characterized by steady expansion driven by comprehensive economic liberalization. Inflows surged from $2.2 billion in 1999-2000 to over $22 billion by 2006-2007, establishing momentum that would carry forward for years.
But this investment, as the present sagging graph shows, can be sustained only on a holistic economic growth for which both a conducive political environment, ease of doing business and ability to generate corresponding level of economic employment is ensured.
As for the growing GDP and India poised to become the fourth-largest economy in the world, it is hardly a cause for celebration for its glosses over the increasing disparities and the plummeting per capita GDP.
If Modi’s foreign visits, drain as they were on the Indian exchequer, could not achieve the goal of buying friends in the international market, is it prudent to expect any positive outcome from a wasteful expenditure of 59 politicians delivering sermons to the world that can watch what is happening on the ground from a distance?
Crisis of Credibility
By any conservative estimates, the cost of this high-profiled 59-member delegation runs into tens of crores of rupees but the message it delivers to the world is only rhetorical – lacking both hard evidence of Pakistan’s culpability and credibility of the ‘unity’ narrative. Much worse, it appears, the world is not even watching.
For India, Pakistan is the culprit behind Pahalgam because the organization that initially claimed responsibility has links in Pakistan and because the latter has been found to be involved or accused of several other terror incidents in India. India claims to have hit non-military strikes in Pakistan and killing over 100 terror operatives in ‘Operation Sindoor’.
The world, however, is more interested in evidence and hard-core facts. The facts are glaring – India has not been able to hunt down the four people it named as directly involved in the Pahalgam killings. The damages India inflicted in Pakistan remain contested and unproven till date.
As for the unity and democratic strength of the optics of an all-party delegation, that is being bandied about as a moral victory is in striking contrast to the ground reality of regularity of verbal and physical attacks on minorities, particularly Muslims, the hate speeches, the intolerance to dissent, the crackdown on free speech and the decaying fabric of democratic institutions.
The moral lecturing can neither gloss over the many cases of lynchings, the calls for economic and social boycott, the cancellation of OCIs, the arrests of people like Prof. Ali Khan Mahmudabad and his bail order that restricts the fundamental right to free speech.
No amount of oratory skills can hide any of this or the shameful fake news industry that India has built or the hollowing out of the judiciary that feels duty-bound to hunt for cryptic codes in every case of free speech. That’s the India they see on daily basis.
To get the world to take India seriously, India must take itself seriously first. To begin with, it must switch off its fake news making industry continuously propelled by Indian government functionaries and their tamed media. The world would be less appalled and more receptive to what India says and does.
Content retrieved from: https://kashmirtimes.com/marginalia/grand-circus-of-indian-delegations-abroad.