Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi landed in Auckland on Friday evening for the first official visit by an Indian prime minister to New Zealand in 40 years. Christopher Luxon, New Zealand's Prime Minister, met him at the airport with a guard of honour.

The stop caps a three-nation tour Modi has been on since 6 July, moving through Indonesia and Australia before reaching New Zealand on 11 July. Luxon and Modi have met before — most recently in New Delhi in March 2025 — but this is Modi's first official visit to New Zealand itself.

Police have run a large security operation for the visit. Specialist public order teams were brought into Auckland from across the country to handle the logistics, according to Operation Commander Inspector Grae Anderson.

Saturday's schedule

Modi's Saturday programme runs through the day. Bilateral talks with Luxon are set for the morning, followed by meetings with business and sports figures in the afternoon. Labour leader Chris Hipkins is due to meet Modi later on Saturday, and the day will close with an address to a sold-out crowd at Spark Arena before Modi departs in the evening.

Luxon has called the visit "historic" and set out a wide agenda for the bilateral discussions: trade and investment, maritime security, education, technology, tourism, sport and global issues. The two leaders agreed in March 2025 to mark 100 years of sporting relations between India and New Zealand in 2026.

The free trade agreement

A free trade agreement between the two countries passed its first reading in Parliament this week, moving through the domestic ratification process at the same time as Modi's visit. Once fully implemented, the deal will reduce or eliminate tariffs on 95 percent of New Zealand's exports to India.

The agreement was announced in December, after negotiations that moved quickly by the standards of New Zealand trade diplomacy. Luxon and Modi had set a 60-day target for concluding talks when they met in New Delhi in March 2025. The deal was formally concluded in late December, with India's trade ministry saying it could boost bilateral trade tenfold over a decade. Both countries say the aim is to double trade between them.

Coalition tensions

Not everyone in the government coalition is backing the deal. Winston Peters, leader of New Zealand First — a coalition partner sitting alongside National and ACT in government — has called the deal "neither free nor fair." Peters holds the Foreign Affairs portfolio, which makes his public dissent on trade policy stand out at a sensitive moment.

His objection has not been detailed further, but it lands as the agreement moves through select committee scrutiny and toward its second reading in Parliament. It gives Labour and opposition voices an opening to examine the substance of the tariff schedule rather than treating the visit as only a ceremonial event.

Continuity and what to watch

The broader diplomatic thread running through this visit is continuity rather than novelty. Luxon and Modi have now met multiple times in just over a year, with their New Delhi talks explicitly framed around deepening the relationship. What differs this time is the venue and scale of public engagement — the Spark Arena event and Saturday's meeting with Hipkins put the visit into domestic political circulation in a way that routine ministerial travel does not.

For the Press Gallery, the story to track past this weekend's ceremony is whether Peters' criticism becomes a sustained point of disagreement inside Cabinet or remains an isolated objection. The FTA still has further parliamentary stages to pass through, and how New Zealand First votes and speaks at each of those stages will reveal more about the coalition's cohesion on trade policy than anything said at Auckland Airport.