Modi-Putin car ride: When wheels drive diplomacy

Amidst the burgeoning tensions in the India-US relations, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit hosted by China in its Tianjin city has been grabbing a lot of attention. The visuals of Prime Minister Narendra Modi laughing and sharing a casual moment with China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are making the rounds, sparking a new wave of speculations of a formal Russia-India-China (RIC) revival.

One image that has particularly generated a great amount of interest is Prime Minister Narendra Modi travelling with the Russian President Putin in his Aurus Senat Limousine to the venue for their official bilateral talks. In a post on social media platform X, Modi not only shared the image but also called their conversations “always insightful”. It is being reported that this joint car ride came at the instance of President Putin only, who also waited for ten minutes for Prime Minister Modi to join him in his vehicle.

Interestingly, just a fortnight ago, Putin had shared the car backseat with another world leader, President Donald Trump, during the duo’s summit meeting in Alaska. Although the meeting did not bring a favourable outcome, with Russia resuming military operations against Ukraine at an even more intense level, the way Trump laid out a superstar welcome to Putin, including a ten-minute ride in his Cadillac Limousine, was noted widely.

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Car rides do break the protocol and leave the staff scrambling to make last-minute changes, but they also offer a good chance for informal conversations as well. In fact, Putin and Modi’s car ride in Tianjin also led to a slight confusion, making organisers adjust their plan accordingly, but the 15-minute car ride as well as the 45-minute-long conversation between the two leaders inside the Limousine laid the necessary groundwork for the formal talks ahead.

The relationship that India shares with Russia has come under a lot of attack recently from the Trump administration, which has gone to the extent of calling India a “war profiteer” and their relations as “certainly a point of irritation” in the US-India relationship. But PM Modi has hardly shown any sign of climbing down from reaching out with a firm intention of partnership towards Russia, as is also evident at the bilateral held this week. Both leaders vowed to strengthen their economic equation further, seeking to attain a target of $100 billion by 2030, and called it a partnership that is important for global peace, stability and prosperity.

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The camaraderie that President Putin and PM Modi enjoyed with each other during the car ride extended well into the formal bilateral meeting as well, with Putin calling Modi a “dear friend” and hailing Russia’s ties with India as special, friendly and trusting.

Car rides, like other forms of informal diplomacy, provide a key chance for leaders to share lighter moments with their counterparts minus the highly structured formal diplomatic setups where each statement or gesture is highly thought through and weighed in advance by a team of career diplomats and learnt experts. These informal exchanges are also of great importance to the leaders in arriving at a favourable outcome for their country since a lot of their own political capital is dependent on foreign policy achievements beyond the usual domestic matters.

Historically, there are instances of joint travels by big leaders such as US President Franklin D Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill during the First World War that helped them to coordinate the strategy of allied powers smoothly. In 1961, during US President John F Kennedy’s state visit to Paris, French President Charles de Gaulle accompanied him in his vehicle as part of the official welcome, with French Republican mounted guards escorting them. The visit was also seen as a success, as it helped Kennedy dispel France’s notion of the US being the dominating force in Nato, and though differences persisted even later, a personal rapport achieved between Gaulle and Roosevelt facilitated future cooperation.

Joint car rides of national leaders are not unusual even today, as there are multiple examples even in recent times of two top leaders travelling together to venues in each other’s cars. Putin himself has extended this gesture a couple of times, including to the President of the UAE, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, during his visit to Moscow in 2024, and to Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi in Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi in 2018.

Prime Minister Modi, who shares a great preference for informal diplomacy with his global counterparts, has also used joint travels on previous occasions to boost India’s relations with other countries. In 2014, he rode with President Barack Obama in his Limousine for a 10-minute ride to the Martin Luther King Jr memorial during his first visit to the country as the PM. At that time, Modi had confided in President Obama about his [Modi’s] humble background by recalling how his mother’s house was as big as his [Obama’s] Limousine car. Obama, who himself had a modest background, raised by a single mother, was very touched by this.

PM Modi also shared a car ride with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu during his historic visit to the country in 2017, the first ever by an Indian Prime Minister. This week’s ride, like the previous shared car rides with world leaders, would also go a long way in strengthening India’s relations with Russia. One of the biggest messages that it sends is of the deeper connection that India and Russia share, where Putin’s gesture is being seen as a very special one.

The author is a New Delhi-based commentator on geopolitics and foreign policy. She holds a PhD from the Department of International Relations, South Asian University. She tweets @TrulyMonica. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.