Ahmedabad continues tryst with world leaders

AHMEDABAD: Ahmedabad’s tryst with world leaders has increased after Narendra Modi became the prime minister in 2014. While Australian PM Anthony Albanese was in Ahmedabad on Thursday, a host of top world leaders, including former US President Donald Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping, former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe, and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, have visited Ahmedabad since Modi became the PM.
Within months of Narendra Modi taking over as PM of the country, Ahmedabad hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping. Pictures of PM Modi and President Jinping sitting on a swing and chatting on the picturesque Sabarmati riverfront were flashed worldwide in September 2014. A foreign head of state was received outside Delhi for the first time. Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited the city in September 2017 and both the PMs laid the foundation stone of the AhmedabadMumbai bullet train project.
A year later, in 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netany a h u v i s i t e d Ahmedabad. PM Modi and PM Netanyahu led a roadshow to travel to the Sabarmati Ashram and inaugurated the International Centre for Entrepreneurship and Technology. In February 2018, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau and his family visited Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar as part of their tour to India. A massive welcome was organized for former US President Donald Trump in February 2020, where Trump and Modi attended a ‘Namaste Trump’ event at the newly cons t r u c t e d Narendra Modi stad i u m . T h e function was a response to the ‘Howdy Modi’ event held in Houston, Texas, in Sep