India-US ties are on an upswing, and how!

US President Biden’s decision to offer a state visit to PM Modi is the clearest signal of the direction Washington wants to take its ties with New Delhi

Prime Minister Narendra Modi who won praise from the West for speaking out last September that “now is not an era of war” can look forward to the rest of 2023 as an ‘era’ — read year — when India’s relations with the United States of America revive to its fullest proportions after the disruptions during the Covid-19 pandemic.

This is the most predictable outcome of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to New Delhi from March 1 to 3.

It is not very well known that in 76 years, only two Indian leaders have been honoured by the US with state visits. The two Indians in public office invited for state visits by the White House were President S Radhakrishnan in June 1963, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in November 2009.

Modi will make history in June by being the third Indian leader to be honoured by the White House.

US President Joe Biden’s carefully considered decision to offer a state visit to Modi is the clearest signal of the direction in which Biden’s administration wants to take its ties with New Delhi during the President’s remaining two years in office, and in his next term if Biden decides to contest — and wins — in 2024.

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US State Department Spokesperson Ned Price’s seven-line readout of Blinken’s meeting with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar must go down as the biggest diplomatic understatement globally so far this year. The Indian side chose not to say anything at all about this meeting.

In the background, both sides are saying that the Jaishankar-Blinken talks in New Delhi have been the most productive exchange between India and the Joe Biden administration since the change in occupancy at the White House two years ago. Indian diplomats in Washington have had their hands full, preparing the ground for a full-scale revival of India-US relations this year.

In Blinken’s footsteps, making it to India this week is the US Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo. More than her role in the Biden Cabinet, Raimondo is the woman politician that the US President turns to in his Democratic Party for advice for retaining the women’s vote bank in the 2024 presidential and legislative elections. Much more than Vice President Kamala Harris.

For India, politically, her visit is, hence, extremely important as Modi battles the liberal perception in Western democracies that he is weakening democracy at home. The supreme irony is that the i's were dotted and the t’s were ticked on the yet-to-be-officially-announced Modi visit to Washington during the very week when Congress leader Rahul Gandhi sought to raise awareness in Europe and the US about his view that India’s democratic credentials were being eroded by Modi’s actions.

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Blinken and Raimondo were not the only Cabinet members from the US to visit India in the last fortnight. Janet Yellen, the Treasury Secretary was in Bengaluru for a meeting of the Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors. US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer led a Congressional delegation with four other Senators and was received by Modi.

An underrated visitor from the US was John Carney, Governor of Delaware, Biden’s home state. Carney worked as Deputy Chief Administrative Officer to Biden when he was a long-serving Senator from Delaware: he still has the President’s ear. From the Indian side, National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, and Minister for Jal Shakti Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, visited the US since the start of 2023.

The US is politically split down the middle after the 2020 national elections, and Washington is in gridlock. Modi will discover during his visit that advancing relations with India is one of the few policies that is being promoted by both Democrats and Republicans. This became obvious when the new Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, publicly pledged his unstinted support to India when Taranjit Singh Sandhu, the Ambassador in Washington, visited McCarthy, not on Capitol Hill, but in his home state of California. To demonstrate Republican goodwill for India, McCarthy lined up several of his party colleagues in the US Congress at a reception for Sandhu.

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Indian mangoes are once again going to the US along with pomegranates, a new export item. In return, India has allowed the import of cherries and pork products from the US. When the India-US nuclear deal was finalised and Sanjaya Baru, then Prime Minister’s Media Adviser, handed over a carton of Indian mangoes to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, there were murmurs in the hall that “we gave India nuclear trade and all we get in return is a box of mangoes.” Bilateral trade has now touched a record $160 billion, and the cliché ‘sky is the limit’ may become true of India-US relations in 2023.

(KP Nayar has extensively covered West Asia and reported from Washington as a foreign correspondent for 15 years.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.