Prime Minister Narendra Modi marks the first visit by an Indian PM to New Zealand in 40 years.
AUCKLAND: Prime Minister Narendra Modi concluded a six-day, three-nation tour of the Indo-Pacific on Saturday, wrapping up visits to Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand that produced a string of binding agreements spanning defence exports, civil nuclear energy and trade. The tour which began in Jakarta on July 6 and closed in Auckland, marks the first time an Indian Prime Minister has visited all three countries in a single circuit since Rajiv Gandhi did so in October 1986, though this time the outcomes carry considerably more commercial and strategic weight than that earlier.
A Tour Built Around Substance Than Symbolism
What distinguishes this trip from India’s past Indo-Pacific outreach is how quickly goodwill turned into paperwork. In Jakarta, India and Indonesia moved a long-standing strategic partnership into genuinely new territory by finalising a defence export agreement worth roughly $630 million, under which India will supply BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles and Astra air-to-air missiles to the Indonesian military. The Astra missiles are set to be integrated onto Indonesia’s Russian-origin Sukhoi fighters, giving Jakarta a credible, sanctions-free option to modernise its air defence at a moment when spare parts for Russian equipment have grown harder to source. Security analysts have described the resulting configuration spanning the Luzon Strait, the North Natuna Sea and the Malacca Strait, as a layered deterrence network that strengthens the hand of several like-minded nations across contested waters, not India’s alone.
Critical Minerals and Ports
Beyond defence, the Indonesia leg produced two agreements that Indian industry has been quietly hoping for. A consortium of Midwest Limited and India’s Non-Ferrous Materials Technology Development Centre signed a memorandum with Indonesia’s state minerals enterprise PERMINAS, giving an Indian private entity direct access to rare earth processing for the first time. Separately, the Steel Authority of India Limited agreed to explore a joint venture with PT Krakatau Steel to build a stainless steel facility using Indonesian nickel, a practical workaround to Jakarta’s ban on raw ore exports. The two countries also agreed to jointly develop Sabang Port near the mouth of the Malacca Strait, complementing India’s own transshipment project on Great Nicobar Island and giving both navies a stronger vantage point over one of the world’s busiest shipping corridors. President Prabowo Subianto capped the visit by conferring Indonesia’s highest civilian honour on PM Modi, a gesture that underscored how far the relationship has travelled since the two countries’ Comprehensive Strategic Partnership was signed back in 2018.
Australia Unlocks The Uranium Pipeline
The Melbourne leg delivered what may be the tour’s single most consequential outcome. India and Australia finalised the Administrative Arrangement under their 2014 Civil Nuclear Cooperation Agreement, clearing the last regulatory hurdle to commercial uranium exports after more than a decade of legal deadlock on both sides. Australian uranium, tracked under strict IAEA safeguards, will now feed directly into India’s civilian reactor fleet as the country works toward its target of 100 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2047. Alongside the energy breakthrough, PM Modi and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese signed a new joint declaration on defence cooperation replacing a 2009 pact and establishing a dedicated Defence Innovation Corridor between the two countries. Albanese called the relationship more consequential today than at any point before. That sentiment found commercial expression too, with AustralianSuper, the country’s largest pension fund committing an additional AU$500 million to India’s National Investment and Infrastructure Fund, lifting its total India exposure to AU$3.3 billion. Around 30,000 members of the Indian diaspora gathered at Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium for a joint public event, while Australia returned three centuries-old bronze and stone antiquities stolen from Tamil Nadu temples, a gesture that added real emotional weight to an otherwise heavily transactional visit.
New Zealand Closes a Forty-Year Gap
The tour’s final stop in Auckland carried its own historic marker, being the first visit by an Indian Prime Minister to New Zealand in four decades. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon received PM Modi personally at the airport. Two leaders used the visit to elevate ties to a full Strategic Partnership, backed by a commitment to double bilateral trade to NZD 7 billion by 2030. The centrepiece here was the India-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement, signed in New Delhi in April after a strikingly fast nine months of negotiation, making it one of the quickest trade deals India has concluded. The agreement gives every category of Indian export duty-free entry into New Zealand, a meaningful boost for labour-intensive sectors like textiles and footwear, while India has protected its dairy farmers by keeping milk, cheese and butter fully outside the tariff cuts. New Zealand for its part secured phased access for select dairy derivatives and committed to facilitating up to $20 billion in investment into India over fifteen years, aimed at manufacturing, infrastructure and clean energy.
A More Confident Indo-Pacific Posture
Taken together, these three legs point to something bigger than any single agreement. Foreign policy analysts at institutions like the Observer Research Foundation have described this pattern as India moving beyond its traditional caution toward a more confident, multi-aligned regional posture, one that pairs hard security commitments in Southeast Asia with energy and capital partnerships further south. None of this comes without work still ahead. India and Australia have eleven rounds of talks behind them on a more comprehensive trade agreement but no firm date for concluding it, the technical integration of Astra missiles onto Indonesian aircraft will take real engineering time to execute smoothly and New Zealand’s own coalition politics mean the FTA’s implementation will need careful management domestically. Even so, for a tour that closed a near forty-year gap with Wellington and unlocked a uranium pipeline that had sat dormant since 2014, the momentum from this week looks considerably harder to reverse than to build on further.
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