Narendra Modi-Netanyahu roadshow in Gujarat on January 17

Ahmedabad : Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu will be holding a roadshow in Gujarat on January 17, said reports. The two leaders will be travelling from Ahmedabad airport to the Sabarmati Ashram via road.

In September, PM Modi and his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe had done a similar 8-km roadshow in an open jeep in Gujarat city. Netanyahu will be the third head of state to visit Gujarat's largest city, after Chinese President Xi Jinping and Abe.

"A highlight of the programme is that the congregated global Bene Israel (lit. children of Israel) community — many of them Israeli from having settled there — will visit the spot where their forebears first arrived on the Indian subcontinent. The immediate agenda is to raise funds for the restoration of a 1980s memorial that marks the site where their predecessors were washed ashore after a shipwreck about 2000 years ago," Sifra Lentin, a scholar on history, recently wrote in an article for Mumbai-based think tank Gateway House.