When Prime Minister Narendra Modi picked up the phone to speak to US president Donald Trump on the evening of February 2, it was arguably the biggest foreign and economic policy call he would make. It marked the final act of a carefully choreographed tightrope walk to pull off an economic coup akin to what Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and his finance minister Dr Manmohan Singh achieved in 1991 when they ushered in transformative economic reforms. In the preceding months, Modi had painstakingly worked to build momentum for what could be India’s greatest international trade outreach since Independence.
