On an official visit to New Zealand on July 10 and 11, Narendra Modi became the first Indian Prime Minister to visit the country in 40 years. Before Modi, the last Indian Prime Minister to visit the country was Rajiv Gandhi. Modi’s visit follows New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s visit to India in March 2025. The timeliness of the visit is evident in the fact that it took only two reciprocal visits by the leaders of the two countries to sign a strategic partnership agreement: the ‘India-New Zealand Strategic Partnership: Roadmap to 2030’. In total, both parties signed 10 chords during Modi’s visit, covering a wide range of areas of mutual interest and cooperation.
Amid all this pageantry, Modi’s visit to New Zealand was an attempt to compensate for a lack of diplomatic play on the Indian side and bridge the economic and strategic gaps between the two countries. This was by no means a trivial matter.
Modi’s visit is rightly considered a landmark event. New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has designated India as a country strategic priority for New Zealand, highlighting India’s growing political and economic influence globally. This attitude was evident in the warm welcome Modi received in Auckland.
The importance of Wellington in bilateral and regional settings has also not escaped India. Several factors justify Modi’s visit to New Zealand. The first reason is the bilateral engagement itself. Modi’s visit, after a gap of 40 years, marked India’s desire to strengthen its ties with New Zealand despite the geographical distance. As both sides have shown, distance need not be a barrier to cooperation, especially when interests converge.
Economic interests are a key driver of this renewed commitment. Even though bilateral trade remains modest, at around $2.4 billion, the India-New Zealand Free Trade AgreementThe agreement signed in April 2026, awaiting ratification, aims to unlock greater economic cooperation. New Zealand is seeking to improve access to the Indian market for products such as apples, kiwifruit and Manuka honey, while India continues to protect its dairy sector to protect small farmers.
Beyond trade, the agreement develops cooperation in agriculture, food technology and skills mobility, including the Kiwi Action Plan under the Agricultural Productivity Partnership, and a pathway for 5,000 skilled Indian workers to work in New Zealand each year. Although the migration provisions have sparked a national debatethe broader economic agenda is ambitious, with New Zealand committing to invest US$20 billion in India over 15 years and both sides aiming to increase bilateral trade to NZ$7 billion (around US$4 billion).
The second reason is about diaspora engagement and connections between people. Diaspora outreach has been a recurring instrument of the Modi government’s foreign policy, and New Zealand, home to around 300,000 Indians and people of Indian origin, represented a natural choice for its deployment. Modi’s visit took place in particular in a context of domestic disturbances in New Zealand on Indian migration following the recently concluded mobility arrangements. Given that New Zealand political discourse places considerable emphasis on multiculturalism and diversity, and given the growing electoral importance of the Indian diaspora, such frictions carry significant political costs for policymakers. Modi’s visit can likely be interpreted as an attempt to alleviate this discontent, at least partially. Reports and images enthusiastic and numerous reception during his community address suggest that his position within the diaspora in New Zealand remains largely intact.
Sporting ties add an additional dimension, even if the stakes are lower, to the Indo-New Zealand relationship. Both countries share a deep cultural investment in cricket and hockeysymbolically reflected this year in the commemorations marking “100 years of unity through sport”.
Third, 2026 marks the 12th anniversary of the launch of Modi’s Act East policy, which represents a proactive evolution of the Look East policy initiated in 1992. This framework is at the heart of India’s engagement with the East, as evidenced by Modi’s multiple visits to Southeast Asian and Indo-Pacific countries this year, including Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia and now New Zealand. Mutual visits by regional leaders, including those from Japan, Myanmar and Vietnam, further highlight the importance of these states to India’s Indo-Pacific strategy.
Geographically, New Zealand has long been part of the Act East framework, but its integration has always been weaker, both diplomatically and institutionally, than that of other regional partners. Although growing ties with Australia and outreach to Pacific island countries strengthened India’s presence in the South Pacific, the absence of sustained high-level engagement with New Zealand, the key institutional actor in the sub-region, meant that the policy lacked a crucial anchor. Now that the Act East policy is integrated into the broader Indo-Pacific framework, it makes perfect sense for New Zealand to be included in a more meaningful way. This inclusion also demonstrates New Delhi’s efforts to look to the broader Indo-Pacific region and build stronger ties with like-minded democracies with which it shares a number of commonalities, and New Zealand fits well into this strategic design.
The fourth point, and arguably the most important, is strategic justification. Many U.S. allies and partners are increasingly unsure about the extent to which they can count on Washington’s security guarantees, a doubt heightened by the unpredictability of the Trump administration’s approach. This is part of a broader shift toward a more contested multipolar order in which U.S. primacy can no longer be assumed.
This point was reinforced on July 6, when China tested a ballistic missile from a submarine carrying a dummy warhead in the South Pacific; the missile landed in the South Pacific nuclear-free zone established by the 1986 Treaty of Rarotonga. New Zealand received only a few hours’ notice. The episode highlighted that even New Zealand is not immune to growing security pressures – and unease about the continued strength of the United States’ extended deterrent.
It seems that we are entering a period in which past alliances and mechanisms have less weight than before. However, for India, institutional asymmetry has always been part of the equation. Now that the US presence is less felt in the region, India is reorienting its own Indo-Pacific approach so that US centrality matters less than the action of states directly affected by regional developments, and New Zealand is playing an important role in this reconfiguration. The two countries emphasized maritime security and closer cooperation, reiterating in their official speech their intention to deepen exchanges on Indo-Pacific issues.
Modi’s visit to New Zealand was of both bilateral and regional importance, addressing a wide range of issues. It also comes at a time when middle powers in the Indo-Pacific region are seeking to strengthen their security arrangements with each other, in a regional order where the US presence can no longer be assured. Both sides appear determined to continue this momentum, but such progress is not guaranteed.
High-level visits carry symbolic and diplomatic weight, but on their own, these summits risk producing only one-off, episodic results rather than lasting change – particularly in security cooperation, which requires sustained institutional monitoring rather than one-off agreements. New Zealand’s domestic politics, including backlash over mobility deals and attacks on the Indian diaspora, could easily complicate matters if not managed carefully. New Zealand may find it useful to learn from Australia’s model of managing similar tensions while deepening its ties with India.
For now, what matters is that this momentum does not stop; it should not take another four decades for an Indian Prime Minister to visit New Zealand again. As things stand, both parties have sufficient economic and strategic justification to continue their engagement.
