India finally arrives in the South Pacific
Prime Minister Modi’s visit to New Zealand — the first by an Indian Prime Minister in four decades — resets bilateral ties after years of neglect
When Narendra Modi closed the final leg of a nine-day arc that began in Jakarta, in New Zealand, he did so by closing a much longer gap. No Indian Prime Minister had set foot in New Zealand in forty years; only Indira Gandhi in 1968 and Rajiv Gandhi in 1986 had come before him.
That the visit lasted barely a day, bookended by talks with Christopher Luxon and an address to the diaspora at Auckland’s Spark Arena, only underlined how overdue it was.
The three-nation itinerary was not incidental. Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand together mark the arc of India’s “Act East” outreach into the Indo-Pacific, a region where Delhi has spent a decade playing catch-up to China’s economic and naval footprint. In Jakarta, Modi discussed heritage conservation at Prambanan; in Australia, the two countries struck a uranium export deal, feeding India’s push towards 100 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2047.
New Zealand was the finale, smaller in scale but symbolically significant as the relationship’s most underdeveloped corner. The challenges are real and long-standing. Trade talks, first launched in 2010, collapsed in 2015 over India’s reluctance to open its dairy sector to protect its millions of small farmers.
Even the Free Trade Agreement signed this April, ahead of Modi’s visit, reflects that caution: bulk infant formula and select re-exports get duty-free access, but butter and cheese-the products New Zealand’s dairy industry actually wants to sell-stay largely outside the deal, prompting open disappointment from its dairy lobby.
Separately, the presence of pro-Khalistan groups in New Zealand-including a 2024 referendum push by Sikhs for Justice that drew a formal protest from Delhi-remains a running irritant, echoing the friction that has strained India’s ties with Canada. Against these frictions sit sturdier binding factors: a 200,000-strong Indian diaspora, growing convergence on Indo-Pacific maritime security, and a shared wariness of an assertive China across the Pacific. These pulled the two governments towards each other despite the trade impasse, and this visit turned that convergence into tangible outcomes. Modi and Luxon elevated the relationship to a strategic partnership and signed eighteen outcomes, including ten formal agreements: a four-year roadmap for cooperation, a reciprocal logistics support pact between the two navies, a maritime cooperation framework, and a pledge to jointly tackle transnational crime, from drug trafficking to cyber-enabled fraud.
They also set an aspirational target of doubling two-way trade to NZ$7 billion by 2030. The real test now is follow-through. The FTA still needs ratification and entry into force, and its dairy carve-outs will keep testing New Zealand’s patience unless Delhi shows more flexibility over time. And the defence commitments-naval exercises and cyber cooperation-need budgets and calendars behind them, not just communiqués.
