In an India-US relationship increasingly tested by geopolitics, a direct line between leaders may do more than a round of public diplomacy. While diplomacy is often imagined in the grand settings of summit tables and choreographed handshakes, some of its most consequential work happens without any of them. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent conversation with US Vice-President JD Vance is in this less glamorous sense. Amid the chill pervading India-US relations, the signifi