Nary a Critical Word: Bill Gates’s Close Bond With Narendra Modi

In September 2019, Bill Gates presented Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India with an award on behalf of his philanthropic organization, the Gates Foundation, for the Indian leader’s work on improving sanitation.

An uproar followed.

Three Nobel Peace Prize laureates wrote to Mr. Gates, arguing that Mr. Modi, who was given the award on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, did not deserve the recognition because democratic and human rights had eroded under his rule. “This is particularly troubling to us, as the stated mission of your foundation is to preserve life and fight inequity,” the laureates wrote.

The outrage did little to deter Mr. Gates and Mr. Modi, who have developed an unusually warm and high-profile relationship in the past decade.

They have met several times, and Mr. Gates has been nothing but complimentary of Mr. Modi. Last year, just before a national election, Mr. Gates sat down with the prime minister for an extended televised exchange that Mr. Modi used to burnish his image as a tech-savvy leader.

The relationship between Mr. Gates and Mr. Modi, according to observers, former foundation employees and critics, yields benefits for both men. Mr. Gates is set to visit India in the coming week, his third visit in three years, and will meet with government leaders and others to discuss India’s innovations and progress.

“This trip will give me a chance to see what’s working, what’s changing and what’s next — for India and the foundation,” Mr. Gates wrote on GatesNotes, his personal blog.

India is central to Mr. Gates’s philanthropic work, which makes it essential for the Gates Foundation to stay on the good side of a government that has cracked down on organizations backed by foreign donors. With the vast number of Indians in dire poverty, global development goals cannot be met without progress in India.

The Gates Foundation’s continued access to India has become all the more important as President Trump has withdrawn the United States from the World Health Organization and gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development. The W.H.O., which supports a range of public health programs in India, is facing budget cuts after the United States’ exit. The Gates Foundation, a behemoth in global public health and development, is among the top donors to the W.H.O.

For Mr. Modi, an endorsement from Mr. Gates — the very face of the computer age to many Indians — is a way to connect the Gates technological legacy to the digital economy championed by the Modi government, a pillar of its “Developed India” policy.

Mr. Modi’s desire to harness technology for growth personally resonated with Mr. Gates, given his deep belief in the power of innovation for progress, according to posts he has written on GatesNotes and two former employees with direct insight into the foundation’s activities in India. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing professional relationships.

Representatives of the Gates Foundation and Gates Ventures, the philanthropist’s private office, did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for India’s Ministry of External Affairs had no immediate comment.

Mr. Gates has ample company in embracing Mr. Modi, with political and business leaders across the West courting India as a rising geopolitical and economic power. In doing so, many have turned a blind eye to the Modi government’s assault on the country’s secular foundations, its demonization of India’s Muslim minority and its silencing of civil society.

Globally, the recognition from Mr. Gates brings attention to Mr. Modi for his development work rather than his Hindu nationalist politics. Domestically, the relationship has potential political benefits for Mr. Modi.

“The tech-driven sections of the Indian middle class, they grew up with Gates as this iconic figure,” said P. Sainath, an activist who is the founder and editor of the People’s Archive of Rural India, an independent digital media outlet. “Being in good with Bill Gates doesn’t hurt your image with those classes.”

Each Other’s Cheerleader

India’s ties with Mr. Gates and with Microsoft, the company he co-founded, run deep. Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, is from India. In January, Mr. Nadella announced plans to invest $3 billion in India, including in artificial intelligence, to help further Mr. Modi’s vision. Mr. Gates has visited India more than a dozen times over the decades, including as Microsoft’s chief executive.

The Seattle-based Gates Foundation, which was started in 2000, opened its India office in 2003 and has invested more in the country than anywhere besides the United States. This year, the foundation’s board of trustees will meet in India as it celebrates its 25th anniversary.

The foundation has partnered with successive Indian governments, supporting public health initiatives, such as polio eradication. It also works closely with the governments of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, two populous and impoverished Indian states. Mr. Gates sat down with previous Indian prime ministers, including Mr. Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh. But the conversations were typically focused narrowly on the foundation’s work in India.

Mr. Gates hit it off with Mr. Modi during their first meeting in 2014, talking for twice as long as scheduled, according to a GatesNotes post. He said he was impressed with Mr. Modi because of their shared focus on public health, in particular sanitation. Toilets were “high on the agenda, along with vaccines, bank accounts and health clinics.”

Open defecation and waste management remain huge challenges in India, a country of 1.4 billion people. Mr. Modi’s government launched the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Mission), and by 2019, it claimed to have built more than 100 million toilets. That was the work for which the foundation gave him the award, drawing a backlash.

When Mr. Gates traveled to India in 2023, he said his sit-down with Mr. Modi was the “highlight” of his visit and commended him on the country’s digital payments system. “The country is showing what’s possible when we invest in innovation,” he wrote on GatesNotes.

Several people with knowledge of the foundation’s affairs said some employees were unnerved by Mr. Gates’s embrace of Mr. Modi, arguing that the foundation could have pursued its goals and aligned with the government’s objectives without Mr. Gates’s becoming a cheerleader for the prime minister.

Mr. Modi has also heaped praise on Mr. Gates, saying that his government valued the foundation’s expertise and its data- and evidence-driven approach. In 2020, when they met virtually during the pandemic, Mr. Modi encouraged the foundation to “take the lead” in analyzing health care and education changes needed in a post-Covid world.

Last March, three weeks before an election in which Mr. Modi was seeking a third term, he invited Mr. Gates to his official residence for a chat about the country’s progress in using technology to improve the lives of Indians.

The government had planned to air the entire meeting on national television, which reaches more than 650 million people. But the Election Commission told the public broadcaster that doing so would give Mr. Modi’s party an unfair advantage, according to a report in The Economic Times, an Indian newspaper. In the end, only parts of Mr. Modi’s chat with Mr. Gates was aired on television, although it was streamed in full on the website of Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

A spokesman for the Election Commission said he did not have information about the event. Rajiv Kumar, the chief election commissioner at the time, did not respond to requests for comment.

Tight Grip on Foreign Donors

India has long relied on foreign donors to meet its goals. Organizations like Amnesty International, Rotary International, the Red Cross, Oxfam, U.S.A.I.D. and Greenpeace, as well as various United Nations bodies and private groups like the Ford, Rockefeller and Gates Foundations, provided funding to a thriving local community of nongovernmental organizations or worked alongside them.

But as the Modi government grew increasingly intolerant of any criticism or challenge, including from overseas, Indian laws that regulate the flow of foreign donor funds into domestic nonprofits grew more stringent and were applied more frequently.

A year after Mr. Modi became prime minister in 2014, the government launched a crackdown on foreign organizations, starting with Greenpeace. Many began to scale back their activities or take steps to ensure that their agendas were aligned with the government’s goals.

In 2017, the Indian government accused the Public Health Foundation of India, one of the country’s largest nonprofit groups, of misusing funds and revoked a license allowing it to receive foreign contributions. The Gates Foundation was a big donor to the organization. The health nonprofit regained its license in 2021.

The Gates Foundation has made it clear that its role is to help the Indian government meet its objectives by offering expertise in priority areas like ensuring access to financial services for the poor, female-led development, public health and climate change.

The foundation hewed closely to that message after the controversy over the award it presented to Mr. Modi.

At the time, the foundation said its award was narrowly focused on sanitation goals.

Not long after, Mr. Gates met with Mr. Modi in India. According to a government news release at the time, Mr. Gates reinforced his foundation’s commitment to supporting the goals of the Indian government.