Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s three-day US visit has three principal components, namely his meetings with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris; two, his meetings with business honchos to explore or fix new deals; and three, the PM’s address of the UN General Assembly in New York, which is no more than a routine exercise. Visiting the US for the seventh time in as many years, the PM would have extensive discussions at the highest level of the US administration to try and re-establish the close ties he had maintained with the former US administration of Donald Trump.
India might look for assurances in relation to the Taliban governance in Afghanistan and its implications on terrorist forays in the geopolitical region. From what Biden has stated the other day, his policy is to eschew military offensives and concentrate more on dialogue in solving issues between the US and other nations. It implies that the US under his governance would look more inward. In reality, the world needed a big brother; and Americans in the past nearly a century held that role. The US strength is diminishing and China is on the ascendant. The approaches of the US and China on global matters were, and will in future be, vastly different. A high sense of responsibility is, frankly, not in the Chinese DNA.
India’s own relations with the US have not been very strong. For many years in the past, India sided with the Russians. The end of the Cold War created a situation in which neither Russia wanted India nor India sought out Russia. India edged closer to the US through successive governments since the 1990s. The warming up was slow because the traditional regional ally for the US, namely Pakistan, remained the fly in the ointment. The US cannot turn its back on Pakistan to side with a hesitant ally like India. India is too cautious to do the US bidding or to play American games against neighbour China. Pakistan, on the other hand, showed a rare smartness in having one leg in the US boat and the other in the Chinese. India has no strong foreign policy initiatives after the era of the Non-Aligned Movement, which too was more pro-Moscow in its nature. The end of the Cold War also spelled the end of the NAM. Now, it is the season of drift. What India gets from the US in the present visit of the PM is still worth a watch.
