Donald Trump was welcomed rather stridently in the city of Ahmedabad Monday, Newsweek reports, adding that this is the President’s first official visit to India.
The President was accompanied by first lady Melania Trump, as well as his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner, to the center of the huge “Namaste Trump” event at the Sardar Patel Stadium in Gujarat, the home state of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The visit was a reciprocation of the “Howdy Modi” event arranged for the prime minister’s visit to Texas last year. Both programs were designed to emphasize the close relationship and growing cooperation between the two populist leaders and their nations.
Trump’s motorcade sped to the stadium past large signs declaring, “Robust relations, democratic traditions,” “Two strong nations, one great friendship,” and “Stronger friendship for a brighter future.”
In the stadium, Trump and Modi swapped effusive praise. “Everybody loves him but I will tell you this, he is very tough,” the president said of Modi.
He called the prime minister—who won a landslide election victory last year to secure a second term in office—an “exceptional leader, a great champion of India, a man who works night and day for his country and a man I am proud to call my true friend.”
Modi said Trump’s visit was “a great honor for us.” The President “thinks big,” he said, “and what he has done for realizing the American dream is well-known.”
Though Trump struggled to pronounce multiple Indian names and Hindi words, he received rapturous applause from the Modi-loyalist crowd, who chanted Modi’s name every time he stepped to the podium. Trump also invoked cricket and Bollywood in his praise of Indian culture.
Trump said the U.S. and India will deepen their military cooperation, noting the Tiger Triumph combined arms exercises between the two countries.
The President said the U.S. is “providing India with some of the best and most feared military equipment on the planet” including a multi-billion deal for helicopters and other equipment. The U.S., he asserted, “should be India’s premiere defense partner, and that’s the way it’s working out.”
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