On 11 March 2016, Modi took the stage to address a huge gathering held on the flood plain of the Yamuna River, southeast of Delhi. The event at which he spoke – the World Culture Festival – was apparently attended by as many as three and a half million people and watched by a similar number on television and the internet. It was organised by a group called the Art of Living Foundation, led by the spiritual guru and self-styled humanitarian Sri Ravi Shankar. It was no ordinary gathering of followers or faithful. The Modi government was a prominent sponsor, contributing some 2.25 crore rupees (22.5 million rupees or about $370,000) towards the cost of staging the event (Jain, 2016). Some one thousand religious leaders and 750 ‘key’ politicians also took part, according to the organisers (Art of Living, 2018). Apart from Modi, former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, the Pakistani senator and sometime ambassador to Washington, Sherry Rehman, Syria's Grand Mufti, Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun, the Buddhist leader Hsin Tao, the former President of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, and the erstwhile Norwegian Prime Minister, Kjell Magne Bondevik, all addressed the participants. And they were joined by a number of senior Indian ministers, including Arun Jaitley (Finance Minister), Sushma Swaraj (External Affairs Minister), Rajnath Singh (Home Minister) and Ravi Shankar Prasad (Law and Justice Minister), as well as Modi's key lieutenant, BJP President Amit Shah.

From the most part, these dignitaries delivered innocuous messages, intended to be inspiring and uplifting. Modi's short speech, however, was more pointed. He lavished praise on Ravi Shankar and his Art of Living Foundation for the work that they had done not just in promoting interreligious dialogue, but in restoring confidence to India, making its art and music known to the world, and boosting what he called – lapsing into English – India's ‘soft power’. They and similar organisations were helping to spread knowledge of the truth of vasudhaiva kutumbakam beyond India, he observed, extending its cultural influence (Modi, 2016a).