PM Modi Calls for Restraint But Optics Tell a Different Story

An aerobatic display the very next day made PM Modi’s austerity appeal look as if it applied to different people.

Five days after asking ordinary Indians to avoid foreign travel, the Prime Minister himself departs on a six-nation tour—the UAE, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Italy, and back.

(Photo: Aroop Mishra/The Quint)

Effective political communication rests on two pillars: timing and sensitivity. Get the timing right and a leader reaps the credit for foresight. Get it wrong and the message either evaporates for want of a hook or arrives so late it looks reactive.

Sensitivity, meanwhile, demands that messages target the median voter—the broad middle—not merely the committed or the marginal. Aimed narrowly, a message misses; one pitched too broadly rings hollow. Together, timing and sensitivity are the difference between a political moment and political noise.

By both standards, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's appeal on Sunday, 10 May deserves scrutiny.

Speaking in Hyderabad on Sunday, and on Monday in Vadodara, the Prime Minister made a sweeping seven-point call for national austerity: use public transport, carpool, work from home, avoid foreign travel, pause gold purchases, reduce edible oil consumption, and shift away from imported fertilisers.

The backdrop was genuine and grave—crude oil above $100 a barrel, the Strait of Hormuz under pressure from the West Asia conflict, the rupee testing record lows near Rs 95 to the dollar, and foreign portfolio investors having already pulled out over Rs 1.92 lakh crore from Indian equities in 2026 alone, surpassing the entire outflow of 2025. India imports nearly 85 percent of its crude requirements, and roughly half of that transits the Strait of Hormuz.

The Contradiction

The call for restraint was not a day too soon. Modi’s outreach was vivid and personal in content, and was an act of economic leadership in what could be best described as a pre-crisis situation.

The problem was not the message. The problem was what followed.

Five days after asking ordinary Indians to avoid foreign travel, the Prime Minister himself departs on a six-nation tour—the UAE, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Italy, and back. That is roughly 20,000 km aboard India One, the Indian Air Force (IAF)'s specially modified Boeing 777-300ER. Add the C-17 Globemaster support aircraft that invariably precede such visits—carrying security equipment, vehicles, and advance teams—and the total fuel cost for the delegation would be considerable.

To be fair: the UAE leg is defensible. With the Gulf state having recently exited OPEC+, direct bilateral energy diplomacy is precisely the kind of mission that justifies a prime ministerial visit at a moment of supply-chain stress. That visit has a clear strategic hook.

The European legs are harder to explain in terms of urgency.

The Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and Italy are valued partners, but the issues on the agenda—semiconductors, green hydrogen, water management, the Nordic summit—are the perennial furniture of diplomatic schedules, not the emergency response the timing implies.

If these visits had been announced before Sunday's austerity appeal, the sequence would have been unremarkable. Coming five days after it, they have become a story.

Then came Somnath.

The very next day after the Prime Minister's fuel conservation appeal, the IAF's SKAT aerobatic team—six Hawk MK-132 advanced jet trainers—performed over the Somnath temple complex to mark 75 years of its reconstruction, in the presence of the Prime Minister. Six Hawk aircraft for a 15-minute display, which would include transit time, staging, and rehearsals would again represent considerable use of fuel.

Why Symbols Matter

The fuel costs themselves are modest. What is not modest is the optic.

An aerobatic display is, by definition, discretionary. It is a spectacle. It burns fuel not to move people or goods or to project force, but to entertain at an explicitly religious celebration. For that to happen the morning after the Prime Minister urged the nation to conserve every litre is a communications failure of a high order.

The criticism is not that the temple's 75th anniversary should go uncelebrated. It is that the timing—the very day after a national conservation appeal—made celebration and sacrifice look like they applied to different people.

The broader political context makes the optics worse. The government's reluctance to raise petrol and diesel prices, understandable through an election cycle but now untenable, has left oil marketing companies haemorrhaging. Under-recoveries have accumulated to staggering levels. The rupee has weakened dramatically. Goldman Sachs has noted that FII ownership of NSE-listed companies has fallen to a 14-year low.

Reports emerged—subsequently denied by NITI Aayog in a pointed social media statement—that the government's own policy body had advised a two-year halt on major construction projects, including the demolition and reconstruction of Nirman Bhavan, Udyog Bhavan, and Shastri Bhavan. Whether the recommendation was formal or informal, its mere circulation signals the level of anxiety inside the system.

Leadership and Shared Sacrifice

When the government's own economic architecture is visibly strained, symbols matter more. Leadership in a crisis derives its moral authority from the perception that sacrifice is shared. Modi's message was correct in diagnosis and necessary in intent. But the plans for his foreign travel and the aerobatics over a political-religious event, undermined it in ways that no subsequent clarification can fully repair.

None of this is to suggest that the Prime Minister should not travel or that the IAF should be grounded. Statecraft requires presence; alliances require cultivation; and the IAF's ceremonial role has its place. The point is simpler and more uncomfortable: when you ask a billion-and-a-half people to sacrifice, the hours and days that follow your appeal must be the most scrupulously observed period of your own conduct.

The Goldilocks principle of political timing cuts both ways. A message delivered too early lacks a hook. A message undermined too quickly by the messenger's own actions becomes something worse than wasted effort—it becomes evidence that the appeal was made for the public, not with it.

Lessons From the Past

India faces a genuine and serious energy and economic challenge. It deserves leadership whose words and actions point in the same direction, at least for the same news cycle.

In the past, too, Prime Ministers have called for austerity and the people heeded their calls. Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri famously called for people to miss one meal a week to help the country cope with the food shortage during the 1965 war with Pakistan. Indira Gandhi famously used a horse-drawn carriage to travel to Parliament in the wake of the 1973 global oil shock.

For the record, on Tuesday, reports said the Prime Minister had asked for his official convoys to be halved. Likewise, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has cut ministers convoys in a similar manner as well as called for a “no vehicle day” to promote fuel conservation. But we have some way to go before the Prime Minister’s suggestions are implemented across the board by the public. Crucial here will be the follow-up measures that are adopted to convince the people of their serious intent.  

That the message will take time getting through was evident on Monday when a senior BJP leader, who was newly appointed the chief of the Madhya Pradesh Textbook Corporation, went in a 200-vehicle convoy from Ujjain to Bhopal to celebrate his appointment.

(The writer is a Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. This is an opinion piece and views expressed are the author's own. The Quint does not endorse or is responsible for them.)