Express View on PM Modi’s US visit: A landmark journey

The visit to Washington this week by Prime Minister Narendra Modi promises to lay the foundation for a long overdue and comprehensive transformation of India’s relations with the US. A series of intense and high-level consultations in the last few weeks has finalised far-reaching agreements ranging from transfer of jet engine technology to investments in India’s fledgeling semiconductor industry, and from innovations in 5G and 6G telecom networks to higher education and quantum computing. The optics of a state visit — PM Modi is only the third foreign leader to receive this honour from the Biden Administration — and a private dinner with Mr and Mrs Biden will underline the new personal bonhomie between the two leaderships at the highest level.

PM Modi will also address a joint session of the US Congress and join the ranks of select world leaders who have done this more than once. In his earlier address to the US Congress seven years ago in June 2016, he underlined his commitment to build a solid strategic partnership with Washington by declaring that India’s “historic hesitations” in engaging the US were now over.

Modi was probably referring to the great opportunity that came India’s way when his predecessor Manmohan Singh was at the White House in July 2005. Singh’s summit with President George W Bush saw the unveiling of the historic civil nuclear initiative that opened the door for ending India’s prolonged conflict with the US and the global system on the issue of nuclear nonproliferation. It also provided the basis for a substantive strategic partnership. It was pitiful to see the UPA government make such heavy political weather of an agreement so beneficial to India. The hesitations of the UPA government, however, underlined the deep ambivalence of the Indian political elite towards the US. To his credit, Modi has broken out of that defensiveness and embarked on a self-assured Indian engagement with the US since he took charge nine years ago. His visit this week is a culmination of this new Indian clarity and pragmatism in dealing with the US.

Meanwhile, the rapidly changing external environment marked by an increasingly assertive China created new imperatives for both Delhi and Washington to elevate their strategic partnership to a higher level in the political, economic, technological and military domains. The substantive outcomes from the visit will be widely seen as a response to the new geopolitical dynamic in the Indo-Pacific as well as the changing global economic order.

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The plans for deeper cooperation between Delhi and Washington, however, are not about containing Beijing. China is too large to be contained; both India and the US seek a normal relationship with it. What Modi and Biden are trying to build is a balanced security architecture in Asia. Getting to a multipolar Asia, it turns out, involves building on the many natural but long neglected synergies between India and the US. The new and deeper connect between India and the US that Modi and Biden want to herald will inevitably transcend the near-term geopolitical calculus and bring the two societies closer.