First lady Jill Biden kicked off Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit on Wednesday, taking the Indian leader to Virginia before unveiling the décor and menu for Thursday’s formal state dinner.
Biden first took Modi to the National Science Foundation in Alexandria, Va., where the pair met with students and highlighted workforce training programs.
“Our universities are partnering together, leading research, creating apprenticeships and internships that span the ocean,” Biden said at the event. “And as we’ve seen here, students from both countries are learning and growing alongside of each other, discovering the people they want to become and building a better world together.”
The Biden administration has put an emphasis on funding programs that help prepare workers for jobs that require some post-secondary education but not necessarily a four-year degree.
“We made it a priority to make sure that not only are there good post-secondary education options for everybody after high school, but that there's real investments in things like technical education at the high school level, real investments in registered apprenticeships,” Deputy Director of the National Economic Council Bharat Ramamurti said in an interview with Spectrum News.
“Because the President feels strongly that getting a good education doesn't just mean reading the classics, it means learning to work with your hands,” he said.
The first lady is a career community college teacher who has taken on a big role in helping her husband’s administration promote “career-connected” learning as an alternative to four years of college.
Modi, who leads one of the world’s largest democracies with an estimated 1.4 billion people, spoke about the emphasis India has placed on education, integrating learning and training. “Our goal is to make this decade a ‘tech decade’ or ‘tech-ade,’” the prime minister said, speaking in Hindi.
Following Wednesday’s stop in Virginia, the first lady returned to the White House to unveil the decor and menu for Thursday’s state dinner, which is being held in a temporary pavilion erected on the South Lawn.
She enlisted help from a guest chef, Nina Curtis, who specializes in plant-based cooking, to work on the three-course dinner with the White House kitchen staff. Thursday’s menu is plant-based as Modi is a vegetarian.
The first course is a marinated millet with grilled corn kernel salad. The main course is stuffed portobello mushrooms with saffron-infused sauce, and the option to add sea bass for those who are not vegetarian. Dessert is a rose and cardamom-infused strawberry shortcake.
Violinist Joshua Bell will entertain guests after dinner.
President Joe Biden, who invited Modi for the state visit, has spent the week thus far in California raising money for his reelection campaign and was due back in Washington later Wednesday. The first lady typically takes the spouse of a visiting leader on an outing in the Washington area, but Modi was traveling alone.
Despite differences with India over its record on human rights and its approach to Russia’s war in Ukraine, Biden extended to Modi the administration’s third invitation for a state visit.
More than 70 congressional Democrats wrote a letter to Biden asking him to bring up human rights in his meeting with the Indian Prime Minister. Two House Democrats, including Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., said they will boycott Modi’s address to Congress in protest.
“It’s shameful that Modi has been given a platform at our nation’s capital — his long history of human rights abuses, anti-democratic actions, targeting Muslims & religious minorities, and censoring journalists is unacceptable,” she wrote on Twitter Tuesday.
With all the pomp and attention being paid to Modi, Biden hopes to firm up his relationship with the leader of a country the U.S. believes will be a pivotal force in Asia for decades to come.