Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in New York on Wednesday, en route to a state dinner and address to Congress in Washington on Thursday.
Soon after landing, Modi met with a series of American business leaders and intellectuals, including his self-professed “fan” Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and owner of Twitter.
“I am a fan of Modi. He really wants to do the right thing for India. He wants to be open, he wants to be supportive of new companies, but at the same time make sure it accrues to India’s advantage,” Musk said in a video interview that was quickly posted to YouTube by Modi’s office.
“I’m actually incredibly excited for the future of India,” Musk said. “I think India has more promise than any large country in the world.”
Musk said Modi is “pushing” his companies to “make significant investments in India,” and he intends to do so, once he can “figure out the right timing.”
“India is great for solar. The amount of land area you actually need to generate enough electricity to power India is very small. I believe it’d be probably 1% or 2% of the land area in India, so it’s very doable,” Musk mused.
Kotak Mahindra Asset Management managing director Nilesh Shah predicted Musk would indeed make those investments, because “every single U.S. company which has a listed subsidiary in India has seen higher growth and value creation in India.”
“U.S. investors will be reassured that building a U.S.-India partnership will be a true win-win situation for both countries,” Shah told CNBC on Wednesday.
Modi met with other business and academic leaders in New York, including hedge fund magnate Ray Dalio, author and philosopher Nicholas Nassim Talib, economist Paul Romer, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, and Grammy-winning musician Falguni Shah.
Dalio said Modi is “a man whose time has come when India’s time has come.”
“The potential of India is enormous, and you have now a reformer who has the ability to transform and the popularity to transform. India and Prime Minister Modi are at a juncture in which a lot of opportunities will be created,” Dalio predicted.
Modi also met with think-tank groups to discuss subjects such as agriculture, engineering, and health care. He said these talks “focused on possibilities of enhancing research collaborations and two-way academic exchanges under India’s New Education Policy.”
Modi’s office played up the enthusiastic crowd of admirers that followed him through New York, but NBC News noted that his approval rating is “much lower among Indian Americans than among Indians living in India” – 50 percent in the U.S. vs. 77 percent in his own country.
NBC’s analysts attributed some of the disparity to Hindu nationalism holding less appeal for Indians living abroad, especially college-educated youth. Non-Hindu Indians living abroad tend to dislike Modi because they believe his government treats minorities such as Muslims, Sikhs, and the Dalit unfairly.
The Dalit is a lower-caste group that enthusiastically supported Modi during his landslide election victory in 2014, but many now feel he has failed to keep his promises to their community, and his Hindu nationalist party has become too divisive.
“For this kind of a ruler to be invited to a state dinner by an American president and to be given an opportunity to speak to a joint session of Congress, where he’s going to talk about the ideals of democracy, is just mind-boggling,” Indian American Muslim Council advocacy director Ajit Sahi told NBC.
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