A white cloth sporting two large Rangolis, one in Tricolour and the other in the colours of the British flag, covered the hallowed pitch of the iconic football stadium. Though tickets for Prime Minister’s Narendra Modi’s event had been distributed free from three months ago, the crowd seemed short of the target of 60,000. But they were not short of enthusiasm despite temperatures below 8 degrees Celsius.
“I am fan, a ‘bhakt’,” says Rishikesh, an engineer who moved to the U.K. from Indore. When they heard Mr. Modi would speak at Wembley, he and six friends decided to drive the roughly 400 km from Darlington to London.
A frail 83-year-old, Satish Kapadia, was among the audience clapping at the Garba performance. Mr. Kapadia, who moved to the U.K. in 1973 to work at the Bank of India branch in London, said he never dreamt that he would attend an event like this with so many Indians. He said his two sons, who he brought up as a single parent in the U.K., could not access Indian culture the way young people today could. Mr. Kapadia catches up on news from India on the Internet. Asked about Mr. Modi, he seems remarkably up to date. “He will have to take the elders in the BJP along,” Mr. Kapadia said.
On stage, roughly 800 artists performed everything from Garba to Bhangra. Alisha Chinai sang her famous “Made in India”, now a catchline made famous by Mr. Modi. She flew in specially for the performance.
Another artist who made a big impact was Wembley-born singer and rapper Jay Sean. Mr. Sean said he changed his name from Kamaljit Singh Jhooti years ago because “I thought people would look at my skin and religion before they looked at my talent”.
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