| Valerie Hamilton |
LOS ANGELES (dpa) – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will get a California-style thrill when he tours Silicon Valley this weekend.
Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk has invited him out for a spin near the firm’s Palo Alto headquarters.
While the drive, scheduled for Saturday, may be Modi’s first time in a Tesla, it won’t be Musk’s first time driving a foreign government leader. Just a few months ago, Musk invited Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to take a ride in his cherry-red Model S, too.
“I did say, is it OK if we go fast?” Musk told reporters, according to news reports. “He said ‘yes.’ It was like, boom.”
For years, Silicon Valley “tended to think of government and certainly foreign policy as not very relevant to their work,” said Karthika Sasikumar, a political scientist at Silicon Valley’s San Jose State University.
India Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses the Sustainable Development Summit 2015, Sept 25 at the United Nations headquarters. AP
But as companies like Facebook and Google have grown and moved into foreign markets, she told dpa, they have come to understand the importance of cultivating ties with foreign governments.
“The big markets are going to be in Asia and Africa in the coming years, and those are countries where the government does play a major role.” she said. “If they want to expand their business… they’re going to have to get involved in foreign policy.”
In the last year and a half, Silicon Valley has rolled out its welcome mat for world leaders including Abe, French President Francois Hollande and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as a delegation of 35 diplomats from countries including Oman, Paraguay, Ukraine and Gabon.
Earlier this week, top technology executives, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook, went the extra mile for diplomacy, flying to Seattle to meet with Chinese president Xi Jinping, whom Zuckerberg greeted in Mandarin.
Silicon Valley’s diplomatic obligations are increasing to the degree that a year and a half ago, it opened its own office of diplomatic protocol to teach local agencies how to handle the foreign delegations.
The interest is mutual.
“This stop is becoming more important than Washington for a lot of these leaders,” Stanford journalism lecturer Janine Zacharia told the San Francisco Chronicle after Netanyahu’s 2014 visit. “They all want to create their own Silicon Valleys.”
A Silicon Valley stopover serves two key goals shared by many leaders.
It can be a way to deepen business ties with the world’s tech capital that can result in jobs, investments and building technology to keep up with the geopolitical competition.
And for leaders like Modi who have built their political success on the digital future, there’s nothing that says progress like going out for a ride with Elon Musk.
“When Prime Minister Modi is welcomed by these very famous names like Mark Zuckerberg and he’s on the stage… surrounded by all of these very successful Indian Americans… that’s just amazingly good publicity for him,” Sasikumar said.
But all the tours, test drives and Stanford symposia don’t always add up to a meeting of minds, especially over sticky issues like censorship and state control of the internet.
Despite the friendly meetings with Google and Facebook chiefs, China’s Great Firewall censors their sites, and tech companies allowed to operate in China have publicly bristled at its demand they turn over user information.
Modi’s weekend visit is the first time an Indian head of state has visited California in 33 years, and it is expected to be be more congratulatory than contentious.
The tech-savvy leader will get his first look at Facebook and the Googleplex, speak at Stanford and meet Indian-born heads of Google, Adobe and Microsoft in the place where they made their fame.
He’ll participate in a Facebook town hall meeting hosted by Zuckerberg and speak to 17,000 Indian Americans at a sport arena in San Jose.
The Tesla test drive may well be a highlight – especially if Musk steps on the gas. It will be worth noting who’s in the driver’s seat.
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