IT ALL BEGAN IN BEIJING. Narendra Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat when he visited in 2011 to pitch his state as a destination for Chinese investment. As India’s ambassador to China at the time, S. Jaishankar was tasked with helping to facilitate meetings with Chinese Communist Party leaders and officials, companies, and even Indian students there.
The Beijing meeting was the starting point of a close and mutually respectful partnership between Modi and Jaishankar—one that is reshaping not only India’s geopolitics but increasingly the world’s. Jaishankar himself has recounted that first meeting on multiple occasions, including in the preface of his new book, Why Bharat Matters.
Of that defining moment with Modi in the Chinese capital, Jaishankar writes, “My cumulative impression was one of strong nationalism, great purposefulness and deep attention to detail.”
The two men’s stars would rise in tandem.
Jaishankar’s Beijing tenure was followed by a move to Washington in late 2013 as India’s ambassador to the United States. Modi was still persona non grata there; his visa had been revoked in 2005 for his perceived role in enabling communal riots in Gujarat three years earlier. (The U.S. State Department termed Modi’s failure to curb the riots as bearing responsibility for “particularly severe violations of religious freedom.”) An investigative team appointed by India’s Supreme Court subsequently cleared Modi of any culpability in 2012, and soon after becoming prime minister in 2014, he was welcomed back to the United States. During his visit that September, he even addressed a packed house of Indian diaspora attendees at New York’s Madison Square Garden, an appearance Jaishankar helped facilitate that has since been replicated in arenas around the world and has become a hallmark of Modi’s foreign policy.
Four months later, days before he was due to retire from the foreign service, Jaishankar was elevated by Modi to foreign secretary—India’s top diplomat, who reports to the external affairs minister—somewhat abruptly and controversially, replacing Sujatha Singh several months before her tenure officially ended. It was only the second time a foreign secretary had been removed from the post.
Jaishankar would be at the center of another prominent “second” in India’s foreign-policy history in 2019. Soon after Modi won reelection
