India Matters! US President Biden rolls out red carpet for PM Modi for his first state visit

[NG Missile Vessels]

 

[Titanium100]

Lmao.. The Indians claiming themselves why they matter to the US.. India is headed towards civil war in the near future. BJP has been dividing India for the better of last 8 years which eventually will come to haunt them as we have already seen in Manipur

 

[El Sidd]

India matters.

Indians don't.

 

[Skull and Bones]

India matters.

Indians don't.

Who can say it better than pakistanis.

 

[JonAsad]

Ooh indians, why do you think you leaders will be treated as dalits when they visit other countries?
and then have mental ejaculation and verbal diaherra of self praise later on the reception?

Foreign visits from head of states are supposed to be received well by the hosts - isn't that normal?

 

[hembo]

Modi US visit: Why Washington is rolling out the red carpet for Indian PM​

• • Published
    1 day ago

IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES
Image caption,
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's US visit has been billed as a turning point for bilateral relations
By Vikas Pandey
BBC News, Delhi

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the US has assumed huge significance amid global economic and geopolitical headwinds.
The White House is pulling out all the stops to welcome Mr Modi - it's a state visit, the highest level of diplomatic protocol the US accords to visiting leaders. Mr Modi will be given a ceremonial welcome at the White House on Thursday before he holds direct talks with President Joe Biden.

Then there is the state dinner, a meeting with CEOs, an address to a joint session of Congress and speeches to Indian-Americans, which have been highlights of Mr Modi's past US visits.

All this for a leader once denied a visa to travel to the US because of concerns over human rights - now the US sees Mr Modi as a crucial partner.

Behind the carefully crafted ceremonies lie discussions that have the potential to not only infuse new energy into India-US relations but also have an impact on the global order.

The Indo-Pacific is where the US possibly needs India's influence more than anywhere else right now. The US has long viewed India as a counterbalance to China's growing influence in the region, but Delhi has never been fully comfortable with owning the tag.

It may still be reluctant to do so but China continues to be one of the main catalysts driving India-US relations.

• The China factor at the heart of Quad summit

But India has not shied away from taking decisions that irk China. It held a military drill with US forces last year in Uttarakhand state, which shares a Himalayan border with China. Delhi has also continued to actively participate in the Quad - which also includes the US, Australia and Japan - despite angry reactions from Beijing.

Indian diplomacy has been getting more assertive about saying that this is the country's moment on the global stage. It has good reason - India is one of the few economic bright spots in the world right now.Geopolitics is also in its favour - most countries want a manufacturing alternative to China, and India also has a huge market with a burgeoning middle class. This makes it a good option for countries and global firms pursuing a China plus one policy.

• Can India replace China as the world's factory?

Tanvi Madan, director of The India Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, says that what matters to the US is what India does and not what it publicly says about China.

"At the end of the day, whether or not India has publicly embraced the tag, it is very clear that Indian governments have seen the US relationship as helpful as they deal with China," she said.

IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES
Image caption,
Mr Modi will hold talks with President Biden during the visit

Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center think-tank in Washington, added that the two countries had now started "seeing eye to eye on the broader Indo-Pacific theatre".

"We are starting to see the US recognise the importance of western components of the Indian Ocean region. For many years, India's main concern, for good reason, was the Indian Ocean region. Whereas for the US, it was the Pacific and the South China Sea. They will look at maritime security for the region now," he said.

The joint statement may not mention China directly but it will be high on the agenda as the two leaders discuss ways to consolidate their presence in the Indo-Pacific.

But while they agree on China, the two countries have had differing approaches to the Ukraine war.

Delhi has not directly criticised Russia, which analysts say is largely due to its huge dependency on Russian defence imports and its "time-tested ties" with Moscow.

India relies on Moscow for nearly 50% of its defence needs, but that's not the only reason. India has always taken pride in following its policy of non-alignment - or strategic autonomy, as it has been called in recent years. It doesn't want to be confined to a specific power centre in the global order, which irked Washington diplomats in the early months of the invasion.

But the US has softened its stance in recent months - it has even overlooked India's continuous purchase of crude oil from Russia.

• India leads demand for cheaper Russian oil
• India's Russia oil imports jump tenfold, bank says

India too has gone a step forward by publicly calling for an end to the war.

Ms Madan added that the different responses to the invasion weren't a deal-breaker in India-US relations.

"When there is strategic convergence, the two countries are incentivised to manage their differences. Maybe not eliminate them, but manage their differences. And I think that has happened with their differing stands on Russia," she said.

IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES
Image caption,
Russia's invasion of Ukraine and China's growing influence in Asia are expected to come up during talks

Meanwhile, other key areas of discussion include technology, defence and global supply chain management.

The two countries have signed what they call the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology. The deal will allow US and Indian firms and universities in different sectors, including IT, space, defence, artificial intelligence, education and healthcare, to work together.

The leaders may also announce more co-operation in technology, especially in semi-conductor manufacturing where China is the biggest player.

Defence is another area that has emerged as a key point of convergence.

India is the world's biggest arms importer and Russia still accounts for a major chunk of it at 45%, data analysed between 2017 and 2022 suggests. But the headline here is that Moscow's share used to be 65% until 2016 - that's where the US sees an opportunity.

• Why India is not criticising Russia over Ukraine

Washington's share has grown but it's still just 11%, behind France's 29%. So some big-ticket defence deals are inevitable - they are likely to announce India's purchase of the battle-tested MQ-9A "Reaper" drones and a deal between GE and Indian state-run firms to manufacture fighter jet engines in India.

Mr Kugelman says defence co-operation between the two nations "has come a long way".

"If you look at the recent track record, one could argue that the treatment the US gives India is not dissimilar from what it gives to many of its allies," he said.

IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES
Image caption,
The two leaders met last autumn - there has been a lot of fanfare around Mr Modi's US trip

While defence and technology will most likely see some big announcements, the same can't be expected in trade.

The US is now India's top trading partner at $130bn, but analysts say there is still huge untapped potential. The two countries have had major differences over tariffs and export controls.India has signed a free trade agreement with Australia and Dubai and is discussing similar deals with others including Canada, the UK and the EU.No such deal is on the cards this visit but the leaders may discuss or at least lay the ground for solving trade-related issues in the future.

Mr Kugelman said the differences were not discarded but set aside in the interests of more mutually beneficial areas of co-operation.
But he added that trade between Indian and US firms has flourished in recent years despite inter-government differences.
It may not be the top priority but trade will certainly feature when the two leaders discuss global supply chain issues owing to the pandemic and China's monopoly.

"Trade used to be a sore subject but I think the two sides are approaching trade policy differently today. But you can't look at global supply chain issues without eventually discussing trade," Ms Madan said.

The timing of the visit is also interesting as both countries will hold elections next year and the two leaders will be looking at sellable headlines for their domestic audiences.

So some big headline-making deals are inevitable. But then, US-India relations have always been complex - with decades of mistrust followed by rebuilding of trust and then occasional flare-ups.

But Mr Biden seems determined to make India-US relations shine even though some in his country have questioned India's record on human rights under Mr Modi.

On the eve of the visit, 75 Democratic members of Congress urged President Biden to raise human rights issues. They said they were concerned about rising religious intolerance and press restrictions, the shrinking of political space and the targeting of civil society groups in India. Human rights groups plan protests during Mr Modi's trip.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken's recent statement spoke volumes about the current status of the relationship: "We know that India and the United States are big, complicated countries. We certainly have work to do to advance transparency, to promote market access, to strengthen our democracies, to unleash the full potential of our people. But the trajectory of this partnership is unmistakable and it is filled with promise."

​

 

[hembo]

India Is Not a U.S. Ally—and Has Never Wanted to Be​

Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, during a news conference in Sydney, Australia, on May 24, 2023.

Brent Lewin—Bloomberg/Getty Images
IDEAS
BY ALYSSA AYRES

JUNE 21, 2023 6:00 AM EDT
Ayres is dean and professor of history and international affairs at the George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs, and adjunct senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the author of Our Time Has Come: How India is Making Its Place in the World.

With Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi slated for a June 22 State Visit to Washington, India will, if briefly, be front-page news in the United States. Since President Clinton ended a chill in U.S.-India relations almost 25 years ago, successive American and Indian administrations across political parties have worked to strengthen ties. So it’s fair to ask: how robust is this relationship today? As with the blind men and the elephant, the answer varies. Is India a bad bet, or is it, as the White House senior Asia policy official said recently, “the most important bilateral relationship with the United States on the global stage”?

Despite careful nurturing by Washington over the years, many aspects of U.S. ties with India remain challenging. Bilateral trade has grown tenfold since 2000, to $191 billion in 2022, and India became the ninth-largest US trading partner in 2021. But longstanding economic gripes persist, meriting 13 pages in the 2023 Foreign Trade Barriers report from the U.S. Trade Representative. Multilaterally, India’s role in the fast-consolidating “Quad” consultation (comprised of the United States, Australia, India, and Japan) has brought shared purpose to Washington and New Delhi, both of which harbor concerns about China. But New Delhi also champions alternative non-Western groupings like the BRICS, and it remains outside bodies central to U.S. diplomacy like the U.N. Security Council and the G7.
Read More: Indian Prime Minister Modi’s Visit to Washington Is His Most Important So Far. Here’s What to Know
Today, U.S.-India cooperation spans defense, global health, sustainable development, climate, and technology, among other things. But deep differences remain, including concerns in Washington about India’s democratic backsliding under Modi, and India’s failure to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In other words, the U.S.-India relationship has been transformed over the past quarter-century, but that transformation has not delivered a partnership or alignment similar to the closest U.S. alliances.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. India is not a U.S. ally, and has not wanted to become one. To see relations with rising power India as on a pathway that culminates in a relationship like that the United States enjoys with Japan or the United Kingdom creates expectations that will not be met. Indian leaders across parties and over decades have long prioritized foreign policy independence as a central feature of India’s approach to the world. That remains the case even with Modi’s openness to the United States.
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For India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, protecting his country’s hard-fought independence was a guiding principle for foreign policy. Speaking in the Indian Parliament in March 1951, Nehru noted that “By aligning ourselves with any one Power, you surrender your opinion, give up the policy you would normally pursue because somebody else wants you to pursue another policy.” Twelve years later, evaluating his country’s nonalignment policy in the pages of Foreign Affairs, Nehru went on to observe that it had not “fared badly,” and that “essentially, ‘non-alignment’ is freedom of action which is a part of independence.”

American President Harry S. Truman shakes hands with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on the tarmac as Nehru’s sister, diplomat Vijaya Pandit, and daughter, future Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, stand with them, in Washington D.C., on October 11, 1949.

PhotoQuest/Getty Images)

For famously allied Washington, nonalignment in the 20th century was a bridge too far; in 1956 then-Secretary of State John Foster Dulles proclaimed that neutrality was “an obsolete conception…immoral and shortsighted.” It did not help matters that the United States had entered an alliance with India’s arch-rival Pakistan in 1954, and sided with the Pakistani military in the bloody civil war that gave birth to Bangladesh in 1971. Nor, too, when Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi signed a “Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation” with the USSR in 1971, definitively tilting India toward the Soviet Union even as the United States had tilted toward Pakistan.

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Especially since the end of the Cold War, Indian leaders have sought to improve ties with Washington, but not by curtailing India’s independent approach to foreign policy. Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee proclaimed India and the United States “natural allies” in a landmark 1998 speech in New York. Yet this was perhaps more a term of art than a call for an alliance as it occurred against the backdrop of India’s nuclear tests, underscoring New Delhi’s willingness to upset global nuclear nonproliferation conventions, which it never joined. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, whose 10 years at the helm greatly improved Indo-U.S. relations, pursued a civil-nuclear agreement with Washington and ushered in new cooperation in high technology, defense, and clean energy. But his government too defended its principle of “strategic autonomy” as a redline for its foreign policy even as it moved closer to Washington than ever in the past. Defending the civil-nuclear deal with Washington before Parliament in 2008, Singh twice asserted that “Our strategic autonomy will never be compromised.”

Read More: What Modi’s Visit to Washington Tells Us About Indian American Voters
In important ways, Prime Minister Modi represents a break with India’s past, most notably in his emphasis on India’s Hindu, rather than syncretic and secular, cultural heritage. But his approach to the United States remains consistent with the history of his country’s foreign policy independence.

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Modi has deepened ties with the United States, now across three U.S. presidents, through increased partnership in defense, in advanced technology, and in energy, just to name a few, as well as through moments of high symbolism, like his 2015 Republic Day invitation to former President Barack Obama, the first time an American president joined this day honoring India’s constitution. Even so, Modi has leaned into the United States while leaning into many other partners around the world. The Modi government invokes a Sanskrit saying, the “world is one family” (vasudhaiva kutumbakam), to frame Indian diplomacy. This approach has been termed “multialignment,” a theory of seeking positive ties as far and as widely as possible, without seeing contradictions in this approach.
In practice, New Delhi has carefully managed its relationships with Saudi Arabia as well as Iran; with Israel as well as the Palestinian Territories; with the United States as well as Russia. India’s G20 presidency this year encapsulates this orientation, with its Sanskritic theme of “One Earth, One Family, One Future,” and its twin efforts to lead the forum for the world’s 20 largest economies while self-consciously presenting itself as the “Voice of the Global South.”

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With this history in mind, it’s easier to perceive that momentum in the U.S.-India relationship does not necessarily imply a path to a formal alliance or mutual defense treaty. In the United States, the mental model for positive international cooperation defaults to seeing “ally” as the ultimate endpoint. For India, that suggests a curtailment of independence. And with India, even as cooperation becomes more extensive than ever in the past, consequential differences remain.

Read More: How India’s Record-Breaking Population Will Shape the World

For many in Washington, the dramatic growth of coordination and joint activities under the Quad consultative group fills a growing need in light of China’s rise, encompassing subjects as far-flung as maritime security, infrastructure, climate and resilience, vaccines, technology standards, and higher education—all underlining Indian strategic convergence with the United States in the Indo-Pacific. Yet strategic convergence there does not mean everywhere: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its year-long war has elicited a tepid tut-tut from New Delhi, while India has escalated its purchases of cheap Russian oil at a time Washington seeks to isolate Moscow.
On closer examination this foreign policy independence and desire to define its own path so prized by India may offer lessons for U.S. foreign policy. The unipolar moment has passed; in its place we have more actors with their own perspectives, and a rising China with global ambitions and its own priorities increasingly shaping the priorities of others. The array of special relationships and alliances nurtured by the United States over decades are still in place, but many of these are now inflected by divergences with Washington. Take Turkey, or France, or Egypt, Pakistan, or Brazil. These U.S. allies do not always see their alliance relationship with Washington as barriers to taking decisions that contradict U.S. preferences. Indeed, President Emmanuel Macron too invokes “strategic autonomy.”

It’s here that India’s ambivalence offers a lens onto the world Washington is likely to encounter on a growing scale. In this world of more diffused power—a world with more diverse actors taking more distinctive foreign policy steps—partnerships and even alliances marked by substantial disagreements might be the new normal. In fact, managing ambivalence may be the central skill for American foreign policy in the years ahead.

 

[protean]

Ooh indians, why do you think you leaders will be treated as dalits when they visit other countries?
and then have mental ejaculation and verbal diaherra of self praise later on the reception?

Foreign visits from head of states are supposed to be received well by the hosts - isn't that normal?

When Hasina visited recently, she couldn't even meet secretary of state let alone US president. She met with some officials and came back. Pakistan PM couldn't get a phone call from US president let alone state dinner. US offers state visits to key allies.

 

[Redbeanpaste]

Who is actually India's friend?

Does India actually have a fully friendly country to watch its back?

Like US and UK

US and Canada

 

[nahtanbob]

Pakistan PM couldn't get a phone call from US president let alone state dinner

Ouch I almost forgot about Imran Khan wait for a phone call from Biden

Who is actually India's friend?

Does India actually have a fully friendly country to watch its back?

Like US and UK

US and Canada

Countries have no permanent friends no permanent enemies except common interests which can change with course of time

 

[surmabhopali]

Ooh indians, why do you think you leaders will be treated as dalits when they visit other countries?
and then have mental ejaculation and verbal diaherra of self praise later on the reception?

Foreign visits from head of states are supposed to be received well by the hosts - isn't that normal?

Depends on the country , poor countries are not very much welcome everywhere , usually phone calls from minor officers is considered sufficient .

 

[ProudThamizhan]

Lmao.. The Indians claiming themselves why they matter to the US.. India is headed towards civil war in the near future. BJP has been dividing India for the better of last 8 years which eventually will come to haunt them as we have already seen in Manipur

Pakistan’s green colour was meant for a different reason but most of you seem to have adopted it for raving mad jealousy.

India matters.

Indians don't.

Paint you green for jealousy: poor you

Ooh indians, why do you think you leaders will be treated as dalits when they visit other countries?
and then have mental ejaculation and verbal diaherra of self praise later on the reception?

Foreign visits from head of states are supposed to be received well by the hosts - isn't that normal?

Dalits are treated quite well. You should update yourself to currency

 

[Redbeanpaste]

Countries have no permanent friends no permanent enemies except common interests which can change with course of time

Very trite remark.

When US goes to war , even when its completely in the wrong , UK will send its soldiers to spill blood alongside.

India has not one single actual friend in the whole world. Truth .

 

[ProudThamizhan]

Who is actually India's friend?

Does India actually have a fully friendly country to watch its back?

Like US and UK

US and Canada

Anyone and everyone who cares about global betterment can be a friend of India.

But friendliness is not full alignment on all matters. That is how serious nations operate. Only banana states and good for nothing people look for sugar daddies and bodyguards and call them friends

 

[LeGenD]

Understandable.

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