Banquet, private meetings with heads of state on cards

After taking oath as India’s 15th Prime Minister on May 26 in the presence of SAARC leaders and Mauritian PM Navin Ramgoolam, Narendra Modi will host a banquet the same evening for the dignitaries and have one-on-one talks with the leaders the following day.

Updated on: May 23, 2014, 24:11:54 IST

Hindustan Times | By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

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After taking oath as India’s 15th Prime Minister on May 26 in the presence of SAARC leaders and Mauritian PM Navin Ramgoolam, Narendra Modi will host a banquet the same evening for the dignitaries and have one-on-one talks with the leaders the following day.

The majority of the visiting leaders will depart after calling on President Pranab Mukherjee.

Sources in South Block told Hindustan Times that the PM-designate will be escorted from Gujarat Bhawan to Rashtrapati Bhawan just before 6 pm, by when the guests and caretaker PM Manmohan Singh would have arrived at the forecourt. After high tea, Modi will be escorted to Race Course Complex while Singh will move to 3, Moti Lal Nehru Marg. The SAARC leaders will move to presidential suites in five hotels in Lutyens’ Delhi after the swearing-in function.

According to the external affairs ministry’s programme, which was discussed by senior bureaucrats in a meeting chaired by cabinet secretary Ajit Seth on Thursday, the regional leaders will be hosted for dinner at Hyderabad House by Modi, with other high-profile guests and newly sworn-in ministers in attendance. The leaders’ meetings with PM Modi on May 27 are also scheduled at Hyderabad House, where matters of mutual cooperation and bilateral agenda will be discussed. These meetings are expected to be over by noon. “We want India’s neighbours to interact with the new PM and expand bilateral cooperation in new areas,” said an MEA official.

While foreign secretary Sujatha Singh had on Wednesday sent telegrams to all missions to inform whether any other VVIP was interested in attending the swearing-in, the invite list as of now stands at SAARC leaders and the PM of Mauritius, which has observer status in the regional grouping. The visiting dignitaries, except Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa and Ramgoolam, will depart after meeting the President the same afternoon.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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