Hartosh Singh Bal is political editor at the Caravan in Delhi.

Narendra Modi might have drawn nearly 20,000 people to hear him speak at Madison Square Garden this weekend, and earned more attention by announcing he will maintain a strict religious diet even during his dinner meeting in Washington with President Obama on Monday. Not to mention that since he began his campaign for prime minister in India, he has won praise from Westerners as someone who can reinvigorate his country’s faltering economic growth. But Modi’s minor-rock star status in the United States largely overshadows other parts of his story that suggest a need for America to be more cautious before cozying up to India’s new leader.

During the Bush administration, Modi was denied entry to the United States for allegedly violating religious freedoms while he was chief minister of the state of Gujarat, and the apprehension that led to the decision has not disappeared. If anything, in the three months since Modi took office, his party has continued to make political use of religious bigotry in the hope of electoral success. At the same time, Modi’s foreign policy record so far also hasn’t inspired much confidence, as he failed in recent visits with the leaders of Japan and China to display the political adroitness that made his reputation in Gujarat.


In India, there is already evidence that his political honeymoon is over. One of the few polling agencies to monitor voter sentiment in the country continuously, Cvoter, has aggregated the answer over time to the question: “Which party can best manage/handle problems facing our country today?” Since Modi was sworn in as India’s prime minister in late May, the levels of trust in his ruling Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) have declined rapidly to where they were a month before the elections, and the BJP—after a national victory that ensured one-party parliamentary rule in India for the first time since 1984—has lost a series of important local elections. The party appears to have misread the votes it got in May as support for its far-right nationalistic tendencies, rather than its economic priorities.

Consider Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, where the BJP lost eight of 11 elections to the state legislature in September. The BJP’s campaign there offers good reason for Americans to remain wary of Modi. It was personally spearheaded by Amit Shah, the BJP president, who picked as the party’s chief campaigner a controversial Hindu priest named Yogi Adityanath, known for his harsh rhetoric targeting Muslims and Christians. In 2005, Adityanath led a “purification” drive in the Etah region of Uttar Pradesh that reportedly converted 1,800 Christians to Hinduism, and he has since been quoted as saying, “Being Muslim—right. Being Muslim in India—wrong.” Among the main themes of his speeches as he went around the state campaigning for BJP candidates was the danger of “ love jihad,” a term coined by Hindu right wingers in India for their belief that young Muslim men are preying on unsuspecting Hindu women.

Modi has not taken any blame (or credit) for Adityanath’s campaign, but it is difficult to believe that he was not consulted for or clued in on it. Shah is Modi’s confidant and was minister for internal security in Gujarat when Modi was chief minister there. He was appointed BJP president largely because Modi backed him for the post, and the parliamentary system requires constant interaction between the two.

The cynical use of ethnic hatred as a political tool in Uttar Pradesh was a disturbing reminder of why so many questions were raised about Modi’s national rise. In 2002, while he was chief minister of Gujarat, violence broke out across the state after the death of 58 Hindu pilgrims in a train fire. The clashes resulted in the death of 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus, raising serious questions about the role of the police and Modi’s administration. As a result, in 2005, the Bush administration denied him a visa under a 1998 law on violations of religious freedoms. The ban was only lifted because, as head of state, Modi now enjoys diplomatic immunity, but he has remained unapologetic about his failure to curb the violence in his state.

So far, Modi seems to be unwilling to moderate himself in the search of a larger national role. For one thing, he has brought his highly centralized system of administration from Gujarat to Delhi. Ministers who are elected representatives have not been able to select their own personal staff, and top bureaucrats in every important ministry are required to interact directly with Modi.

For such a system to function well in a country as diverse and complex as India, the quality and expertise of his close advisers is crucial. But in areas such as foreign policy, where Modi has little experience, there are already signs that his advisers do not bring the necessary level of expertise. Both of India’s previous prime ministers, Atal Behari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, relied on able national security advisers for foreign policy advice. Modi’s pick, however, is Ajit Doval, a former head of the Intelligence Bureau (IB), who has never directly dealt with foreign policy. (The IB’s intelligence work focuses on the Indian homeland, while another agency deals with intelligence abroad.)

This lack of expertise has become apparent in a series of bungled foreign visits that betray a lack of a long-term strategic vision. After early visits to the neighboring states of Bhutan and Nepal, Modi visited Japan at the beginning of September and then hosted the Chinese head of state in India. The Japan visit was highly touted in the Indian media, and much was made of Modi’s supposedly close relationship with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. But from the very beginning, there seemed to be a mismatch between the expectations of the two countries. The Indians had hoped to seal a long-pending nuclear pact and to invite Japanese firms to do business in India, while the Japanese hoped to upgrade security cooperation with India in keeping with Abe’s efforts to counter the growing influence of Chinese power. Modi, hoping for Chinese investment in India, was not willing to agree on greater cooperation, and the Japanese offered nothing on the nuclear deal. For good reason, the trip was dismissed in the Japanese media as more showmanship than substance, an avoidable conclusion for one of Modi’s first major foreign trips.

A few days later, as Chinese President Xi Jinping traveled to India, so did 1,000 Chinese soldiers, who crossed over into territory India claims as its own in the northern border region of Ladakh. The border between India and China is disputed, and each side periodically accuses the other of “intrusion.” But in this case, the timing was significant. For a prime minister like Modi, who has projected himself as tough on national security, the “intrusion” was an acute embarrassment and ensured that the trip wouldn’t get the gloss his advisers would have liked.

Just as Modi is clearly still trying to figure out what India’s position should be with regard to China and Japan, there is no reason to assume he has any greater clarity on what he expects of the Indo-U.S. relationship. Over the past two administrations in India, there has been a steady improvement in relations with the United States. But since the signing of the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal in October 2008, there has been little progress.

A statement Modi issued just prior to his visit to the United States lacks specifics. “I see the US as a vital partner for our national development, drawing especially on the rich possibilities of partnership in education, skills, research, technology and innovation—and, above all, a shared commitment to human values.”

But Modi’s own record is both a strong argument against a shared commitment to human values and a hint that he won’t fulfill the hype that has been generated around this visit. Perhaps, for this reason, a Heritage Foundation report about Modi’s visit, after listing usual areas of Indian-U.S. cooperation—expanding economic and business relationships, expanding defense cooperation, coordinating on counterterrorism—goes on to add another rather telling recommendation to manage “expectations on visit outcomes to avoid a sense of disappointment.”

But there is no reason for Americans to take upon themselves the burden of fulfilling such expectations. Even right-wing Indian commentators who were among Modi’s strongest supporters have already expressed dismay at his foreign trips—and his foreign policy more broadly. One of India’s more prominent right-wing commentators has suggested that Modi’s visit is a complete waste of time, and another has asked him to come home “and stay a while,” to focus on far more urgent domestic concerns. Why should the United States go out of its way to embrace a man who has yet to allay serious concerns about his leadership at home?

Correction: An earlier version of this article referring incorrectly in one instance to Narendra Modi's position in the state of Gujarat; he was chief minister, not governor.