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Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will pay an official visit to Washington DC in September-October, alongside a visit to the UN General Assembly in New York, in what promises to be the last time that he will be visiting the US as prime minister. In the meantime, US secretary of state John Kerry will arrive in Delhi on June 24 for a “strategic dialogue”.
The confirmation that the prime minister will come to the US for summit-level talks, by several Indian and US officials here in the US, is even more interesting when seen in the context of a just-concluded summit meeting – with a small ‘s’, as noted by some US analysts – between US president Barack Obama and Chinese president Xi Jinping.
Several hours of talks between the US and Chinese leaders in a ranch in California – the Chinese, in a surprise last-minute decision, said they would not stay at the same ranch as Obama but at a hotel in a nearby city, presumably for fear of electronic eavesdropping -- resulted in several agreements, including the reduction of climate-changing hydrofluorcarbons (HFCs) and North Korean behaviour, but other key US concerns on Chinese cyber-attacks on US intellectual property and military and missile designs remained largely unaddressed.
So around the time in Goa that the BJP national executive finally agreed to name Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi to a position that fell just short of him being named the party’s prime ministerial candidate, US and Chinese leaders ended their talks in California. Meanwhile, a Track Two political dialogue between India and the US, organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI) concluded with a flurry of meetings in Washington DC as well as America’s top universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and Boston University.
Here in Washington, government officials are now preparing for the India-US CEOs Forum in July, which will be addressed by several government ministers, and followed by the PM’s trip in a few months.
The fact that FICCI’s Track Two multi-party delegation received such significant play in Washington, both in the government as well as on Capitol Hill, has been of considerable interest to US-India watchers here. The FICCI delegation met high-level leaders such as US deputy secretary of state Bill Burns, deputy secretary of defence Ashton Carter, India Caucus leaders in the Senate (including Democrat Mark Warner), India Caucus leaders in the House of Representatives (Democrat Joe Crowley and Republican Peter Roskam), minority leader in the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, the hugely influential Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee Ed Royce as well as Ami Bera, the only Congressman of Indian origin.
US officials said, on condition of anonymity, that the main reason the US government pulled out all the stops for FICCI’s Track Two delegation was to show across-the-board support for India-US endeavours.
According to Jay Panda of the Biju Janata Dal, who led the delegation, the bilateral conversation across the political-economic spectrum included the immigration reform bill being pursued by the Obama administration, which would likely to impact India’s top IT companies such as Infosys, Wipro, Cognisant.
The two sides also discussed the US drawdown in Afghanistan and the ramped –up roles India and the US could play together in that region, as well as noted the changes in government in China as well as Pakistan and how this would impact on both India and the US.
Clearly, as China continues its invincible rise, intellectuals in US think-tanks such as the pro-Obama Centre for American Progress, the centrist Brookings Institution as well as the right-wing Heritage Foundation, believes that India and the US, democrats and allies, must come closer together.
There exists the realisation that China has become too big and too powerful and is coming closer than ever to challenge America. As the Communist Party historian, Zhang Lifan, recently said of president Xi Jinping, “He is falling back on nationalism, talking about making China the number one superpower of the world.”
Interestingly, in the wake of the Barack Obama-Xi Jinping summit, Americans held on to their perception of the Chinese as a people who weren’t following “the rules’ made by the international community, namely themselves.
The recent Chinese aggressiveness – last week a Shanghai company, Shuanghui, bought the US pork producer Smithfield in a deal worth $4.7 billion, following up on a recent ‘Washington Post’ article that said Chinese hackers had accessed designs for more than two dozen weapons systems – has unnerved the Americans, which is why they are now looking for greater allies in the region, especially India.
Clearly, the “China conversation” is a significant part of any dialogue between India and the US, with both agreeing that they must articulate their concerns with the Chinese much more openly. It was interesting to see how Obama and his outgoing national security advisor Tom Donilon have stressed the Chinese invasion of US cyber-space and talk of the nearly $300 billion worth of intellectual property theft with Xi Jinping. US officials also noted, approvingly, that Prime Minister Singh had raised the Depsang invasion of the Line of Actual Control by the Chinese with his counterpart Li Keqiang and articulated a special relationship with Japan.
The change of government in Pakistan is welcomed by both countries with cautious optimism, especially since Nawaz Sharif is a pro-business leader and it is hoped that he will open trade routes not only between India and Pakistan, but also with Afghanistan.
However, the fact remains that both India and the US have several issues that they must sort out, including the not-so-sexy matter of shiploads of basmati rice being returned because they contain a pesticide that doesn’t find any mention in the US Food & Drug Administration laws. Seems that more than $100 million by several basmati manufacturers is at stake.
Coupled with the serious concerns over the possible banning of Indian IT companies in the US if they continue to employ more than 50 per cent foreign workers (mostly Indian, who come to the US on much cheaper salaries), both countries have a lot of work to do.
