India and Britain are moving to finalise Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the UK in November, with a Madison Square Garden-style event at Wembley Stadium expected be the showpiece of the trip.Modi’s address to about 20,000 NRIs at New York’s iconic Madison Square Garden was the highlight of his visit to the US last September. The Wembley Stadium has a capacity of 90,000.

The British government was keen to host Modi for the inauguration of Mahatma Gandhi’s statue in London in March. But with British elections scheduled for May, the Indian side chose to wait for a new government to be installed before the PM’s visit. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had then made the trip to London to inaugurate the statue at Parliament Square in London. According to sources, the British government was disappointed that Modi could not visit London in the first year of his rule when he has visited all major world capitals, including Washington DC, Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, Canberra, Toronto and Bonn. The Cameron government is keen to make up for this delay by pulling out all stops to make Modi’s visit a memorable success, sources added. November is the month when Britain celebrates the end of the First World War in which nearly 1.5 million Indians fought as part of the British Indian Army.