Mr Modi will address 20,000 people at Madison Square Garden indoor stadium

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address a gathering of around 20,000 people in New York, which will be broadcast live to crowds in 20 other cities in the United States on September 28, turning his first visit as Prime Minister there into a show of his popularity.

Former Prime Ministers Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh have addressed people of Indian origin and NRIs mostly in hotel ballrooms, with a few hundred in attendance. But Mr. Modi’s show will be unprecedented in its scale and political message, said sources involved in the preparations.

Union Power Minister Piyush Goyal is coordinating efforts from New Delhi with Bharat Barai and Chandrakant Patel, prominent Gujarati NRIs, at the U.S. end.

The organisers had to shelve the original plan to gather 1,00,000 people in New York after they failed to find a big enough venue. Madison Square Garden, an indoor stadium in midtown Manhattan that has been booked for Mr. Modi’s show, can accommodate only 20,000, said Mr. Patel, president of the Overseas Friends of the BJP in the U.S. “As an alternative, we are organising a video-streaming of his speech to around 20 cities,” Mr. Patel told The Hindu over phone from Florida.