WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry look forward to engaging with the new BJP government at the earliest, including welcoming Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Washington, a senior US administration official reiterated on Thursday, implicitly acknowledging that the massive mandate the Indian electorate has given to the putative PM has effectively overturned the visa ban Washington had imposed on him.
“We recognize the Indian electorate has weighed in with a resounding mandate for Prime Minister Modi and we want to work with him for advancing his goals for India as a regional and global player,” Nisha Desai Biswal, the US Assistant Secretary of State for South Central Asia and the administration’s pointperson for the region, told correspondents while reviewing the latest developments in India.
“The President stated definitely that we will be welcoming Prime Minister Modi. We, like rest of the world, have seen a remarkable election and a remarkable transition…the mandate the Indian electorate put forward is one that we strongly support and we stand ready to engage and assist when the new government is ready,” Desai-Biswal said in a chastened elaboration of a swift turnaround in Washington DC, where Modi has been persona non grata for almost a decade for his alleged inaction or complicity in not containing the 2002 riots in Gujarat.
That episode has now been put on the backburner in the US capital, where administration officials, lawmakers, and policy wonks are broadly pushing for quickly re-engaging with the BJP- and Modi-led India after a winter of discontent during the tail-end of the UPA government. The changed mood was most evident at an event organized by the US-India Political Action Committee (USINPAC) on Capitol Hill where some lawmakers extolled Modi’s virtues and harked back to the NDA government’s previous stint, consigning the ten-year UPA-Congress engagement to the archives.
But the clearest sign that the Obama administration, specifically the President himself, has hit the ctrl+alt+delete button, and wants to reset ties with a Modi-led India, came from Desai-Biswal, who also happens to be a first generation immigrant from Gujarat (her parents emigrated from Dahod in Gujarat).
She said the President saw the just-concluded election in India as a very positive one and he looked forward to welcoming Prime Minister Modi in Washington at the earliest opportunity. Secretary Kerry is also ready to travel to India as and when the opportunity arises.
“We are eager to engage but we also don’t want to overwhelm the new government with our priorities and dates…We are not looking to impose an architecture or a timetable,” the official said.
The two sides are scheduled to meet for the annual strategic dialogue sometime in summer. The Assistant Secretary indicated that the US side was open to dates and venues (although it is Washington’s turn to host the dialogue) but would wait for the new government to settle in. “We are waiting to hear from new government about their preference,” she added.
The official said Prime Minister-elect Modi’s gesture of inviting regional leaders for his swearing in is a “strong positive sign” but it is for the leaders to respond to the invitation.
Despite the difficulties Washington and New Delhi have had in recent months, the assistant secretary challenged doubts in some quarters about the vitality and quality of the so-called strategic relationship. “To say this is not a strategic relationship is categorically false; it is one in every way,” she maintained, reeling off a broad and deep range of engagement between the two sides beyond intermittent problems on trade and other issues.
Source: The Times of India
