One year on, Modi's shown he's the boss of Foreign Office

In his early visits abroad, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was so conscious of making a good impression on his hosts - in Brazil, Japan and the US, for example - that he would practice his speech in front of a couple of Indian Foreign Service officers. The man from Vadnagar, Gujarat, was so determined to learn how to hold his own in his interactions with the world's most powerful men and women that he didn't mind letting his guard down in front of a bunch of sophisticated diplomats. In fact, they warmed to him, believing his gauche but endearing mannerisms to be completely authentic.

Cut to the visit of Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena to Delhi in February 2015, when Modi, by now a master of the teleprompter, welcomed the president and his wife, calling her "M.R.S. Sirisena…" Of course, he meant the female prefix, "Mrs," except that Twitter doesn't respect either hubris or a lack of application.

In the good old days a whole year ago, Modi believed, and rightly so, that his power stemmed from India's strength as an ancient civilisation which was trying to make the umbilical connection with the 21st century. As he told the IFS probationers early on, "It doesn't matter whether or not you know how to hold your fork and knife over dinner," but how you manifest and leverage India's strengths with the rest of the world.

Certainly Modi was lucky - he had some of the best and brightest diplomats in the world to guide him through the tortuous by-lanes of international diplomacy. For example, in his first visit to Nepal in August 2014, Modi made all the right noises as he advised its Parliament to get its act together and formulate a Constitution. It is when he didn't listen and went ahead and cancelled the foreign secretary-level talks with Pakistan on a whim - because its high commissioner to Delhi Abdul Basit had met an ageing and increasingly irrelevant Hurriyat leader - that Modi put his first foot wrong. That decision not to talk to Pakistan is now being slowly reversed. It is obvious the prime minister is now looking for ways to restore the relationship.

And so Modi called Pakistan's Nawaz Sharif in the wake of the horrific Peshawar attacks in December 2014, while Modi's hand-picked foreign secretary S Jaishankar travelled to Pakistan two months later. When Ismaili Shias were massacred in a bus in Karachi in mid-May, Modi tweeted, "We stand by the people of Pakistan in this hour of grief. Now, both countries have decided to play cricket again, albeit in the UAE.

Some would say that it is unfair to hold his misstep on Pakistan over Modi's head, especially since his decision was shaped by his and the RSS' generally anti-Pakistan mindset rather than guided by realpolitik. So what did one make of the PM's recent near-disaster on the Land Boundary Agreement with Bangladesh before he over-ruled himself a week later?

Truth is, in the increasingly one-man party that is the BJP, Modi is ready to hold party interest over national interest - the BJP had persuaded Modi that Assam should be kept out of the Land Boundary Agreement with Bangladesh otherwise it would suffer in the 2016 Assam polls - and no one, least of all external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj, can tell him that, actually, it should be the other way around.

Certainly, Modi's will of steel as well as his incredible ability to communicate with complete strangers - think, the Madison Square Garden event in New York - is unique. Manmohan Singh was cerebral, but wooden, in comparison, while the indiscreet charm of Atal Bihari Vajpayee couldn't really rouse an entire stadium. Modi's warm water-only Navratra fast during his US trip in October 2014 is believed to have really impressed Barack Obama and both leaders conversed easily about the astounding power of social media as well as good governance during their private dinner in Washington DC before the official programme began the day after.

But here is a "Modi-ism" that struck all those who attended that private dinner hosted by Obama in honour of Modi : In the back and forth conversation that flowed between the two sides, Obama would often ask his colleagues arrayed around the table - US vice-president Jo Biden, secretary of state John Kerry etc - to respond to questions or comments the Indian delegation put to them. But when the thread of conversation came back to the Modi side of the table, it was only Narendra Modi who spoke. Not Sushma Swaraj or then ambassador to the US Jaishankar or anyone else sitting on either side of the PM.

So as he celebrates his first anniversary in power, fact is that Narendra Modi has brought an incredible energy back into the Foreign Office. By announcing e-visas to the Chinese, for example, he has in one stroke dismissed the nonsensical concerns of the overweening security establishment, which had actually bullied Manmohan Singh into buying into its fears. Modi has taken a leaf out of the US policy on China - embracing Beijing and believing that the benefits of the embrace will persuade Beijing to tread more carefully on Delhi's toes. Modi is sharp enough to realise that his publicly endorsed bonhomie with his "good friend Barack" (Obama) will hold him in good stead with that other great Asian power. He knows that there is nothing the Chinese respect more than strength.

However, by marginalising the very able and sharpshooting Sushma Swaraj - who, by refusing to be marginalised, has reinvented the Foreign Office in many ways - Modi has displayed a surprising insecurity that diminishes both him as well as the office of the prime minister. He has made it clear to her and everyone else that he is the boss, not the first among equals.

(A version of the above story appeared in India Today.)