Modi in US: A finality of policy continuity, collective contribution and bipartisan effort from both sides

As the prime minister landed in New York, it is hard to wrap one’s head around the fact that Narendra Modi was once denied visa by the United States for nearly a decade using a little-known American law, and the then Gujarat chief minister was the only person ever to have been prohibited from entering US soil under that provision. For a man who was once a persona non grata, the Americans are now rolling out the red carpet for Modi, lavishing on him the fullest hospitality, the highest-ranking and the most prestigious welcome with all the pomp and pageantry that the American state can muster. Since assuming the prime minister’s office Modi has visited the US six times, meeting three presidents in Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. None of his previous visits, however, had been elevated to this stratosphere. Modi’s visit has been designated “official state visit”. It is the fullest-possible honour that the Biden administration has previously accorded to only two world leaders — French president Emmanuel Macron and South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol. Both are treaty allies of the US. To put things further in perspective, Modi is only the third Indian leader, after president S Radhakrishnan in 1963 and prime minister Manmohan Singh in 2009 to receive the highest level of protocol, and the first Indian prime minister to address a joint session of US Congress, twice. During his stay at Washington DC, the seat of American power, Modi will be accommodated at the Blair House — located across the street from the White House — and along with a lavish state dinner hosted by the POTUS and First Lady Jill Biden, he will also attend a private dinner hosted by the Bidens, a state luncheon with US vice-president Kamala Harris and secretary of state Anton Blinken. The prime minister will lead an International Yoga Day event at the UN headquarters. He will also receive a full guard of honour upon arrival and a departure ceremony. He already met a few top American CEOs including Elon Musk. It would be unwise, however, to interpret the pomp and glory being bestowed by the US on the prime minister as Modi’s personal triumph. As an astute and visionary statesman, Modi has never held it against the US for the treatment meted out to him. Under his premiership, the India-US partnership has scaled unprecedented heights. However, the evolution of bilateral ties, the steady tightening of strategic embrace, the depth and scale of the current relationship and the sharply upward trajectory is the logical progression of a relationship that has seen collective contribution and bipartisan effort from political leadership on both sides over more than two decades. As the relationship between the oldest and largest democracies is being celebrated around Modi’s state visit to the US, it is worth remembering that Modi and Biden are standing on the shoulders of leaders before them to drive forward the relationship that has been marked by a convergence of strategic interests over the rise of a belligerent China, safeguarded from pitfalls by multiple structural frameworks built painstakingly over time, and upheld by strong people-to-people ties. From the troughs of the economic sanctions imposed by the US on India following the series of underground nuclear tests conducted by New Delhi in 1998, the relationship that was marked by hostility and mutual suspicion during the Cold War years and indifference in the post-Cold War unipolar era, shifted to a new paradigm with then US president Bill Clinton’s visit in 2000. It was, by all accounts, an epochal visit that would lay the groundwork for the momentum to follow. While the current strategic alignment and operational coordination is being driven in large part by America and India’s shared anxieties over China’s assertiveness and aggression, the Clinton visit that set the tone for bilateral ties occurred at a time when the China threat hadn’t manifested, and the relationship was still marked by deep and mutual scepticism. That the time was ripe for a leap of faith from both sides was a truth that both Clinton and then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee stumbled upon. Speaking at a joint session of the Indian Parliament on 22 March, 2000, Clinton underlined the ‘shared values’ framework that would be one of the fulcrums of the relationship. He raised a toast to India’s democratic credentials, appreciated India’s diversity and framed the ties in terms of “two nations conceived in liberty, each finding strength in its diversity, each seeing in the other a reflection of its own aspiration fora more humane and just world.” As a precursor to the strategic frameworks to follow, Clinton said the US “welcomes India’s leadership in the region and the world” and wants “to take our partnership to a new level, to advance our common values and interests, and to resolve the differences that still remain.” He added that “the old barriers between nations and people, economies and cultures, are being replaced by vast networks of cooperation and commerce. With our open, entrepreneurial societies, India and America are at the center of those networks. We must expand them, and defeat the forces that threaten them.” In his speech, Clinton referred to Vajpayee’s formulation of India and US as “natural allies”. Vajpayee made the statement at the height of antagonism between the two nations at an Asia Society address on 28 September, 1998, amid economic sanctions against India, where he said, “it is this commonality of concerns and cognition, which reinforces my belief that India and the United States are natural allies in the quest for a better future for the world in the 21st century.” Following on from Clinton and underlining the bipartisan consensus that would define the partnership, the George Bush administration took forward the strategic alignment and stitched the framework of the partnership through the 2008 Civil Nuclear Agreement, a pathbreaking deal that paved the way for sharing of high-end technology. The aim was to spur India’s economic growth and ensure energy security. The deal may not have given the kind of results both leaderships had hoped for, but it cemented the enduring bonds of strategic partnership and taught the ‘permanent governments’ — the gargantuan and often obtuse bureaucracies from both sides — to work with each other. As with the jet engine deal now, which involves ramming through export controls by the political actors, the civil nuclear deal took three years in signing and it wouldn’t have seen the light of day had it not been for the considerable political capital spent by the Bush administration that did the spadework in cutting through regulatory constraints and Congressional scepticism. On the Indian side, then prime minister Manmohan Singh staked the very survival of his UPA-1 government to see the deal through. The Obama era was marked by the ‘Pivot to Asia’ policy whereby the US refocused its attention to the Asia Pacific where China’s imperial expansionism was taking shape and the Xi Jinping regime was beginning to challenge American primacy in the Asia-Pacific theatre. Obama, who in 2015 became the first US president to attend India’s Republic Day celebrations, had invited Manmohan Singh on a state visit to the US in 2009, and a newly elected Modi to Washington in 2014. More importantly, it was the Obama administration that launched the ‘US-India Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean Region’ that would lay the basis for the US Indo-Pacific policy to follow. The structure of the evolution is clearly visible in the policy where it says that the “world’s two largest democracies that bridge the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean region”, reflects “our agreement that a closer partnership between the United States and India is indispensable to promoting peace, prosperity and stability in those regions.” To mitigate the threat of China, at a time when the Quad 2.0 had still not been reimagined and relaunched, the policy observes that “Regional prosperity depends on security. We affirm the importance of safeguarding maritime security and ensuring freedom of navigation and over flight throughout the region, especially in the South China Sea.” Obama administration had designated India as a ‘major defense partner’ but it was under the mercurial Trump administration that India’s centrality to America’s policy in the key Indo-Pacific theatre and its role as the guardian of the Indian Ocean was formalized. For all his shenanigans, Trump was clear-eyed about the nature of the existential threat that China poses to the rules-based international order, and the administration’s ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific policy’ places India firmly at the centre of the new structure to manage the rise of a revisionist power. “A strong US-India partnership is vital to the US Indo-Pacific vision”, declared the Trump administration, that reinvigorated the Quad, fleshed out the fledgling partnership of democracies with a stable structure by rooting it in senior and mid-level officialdom and elevated it to a ministerial-level framework. The Trump-Modi partnership saw a hotline being established between the Prime Minister’s Office and the White House — an idea that was mooted during the Obama era, and both India and the United States signed the foundational agreements — the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA), the Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA) in 2018, and the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement (BECA) in 2020 — that widened the scope and potential of bilateral defence partnership. The Trump administration also gave India the status of a NATO-level trade partner by placing India at Strategic Trade Authorization Level 1 (STA-1), tilling the path for high-technology sharing in civil space and defence sectors and creating the agenda for enhancing bilateral defence trade. This trajectory has been given a new momentum by Biden administration in partnership with the Modi government. It has seen the relationship go from strength to strength to arrive at the juncture it has today. What emerges from the trend is the remarkable policy continuity in both countries across several regimes. The presidents and the prime ministers couldn’t have been more different in personalities and yet they were driven by the need to stitch what Biden administration official Kurt Campbell calls “most important bilateral relationship in the 21st century.” The author is Deputy Executive Editor, Firstpost. He tweets @sreemoytalukdar. Read all the Latest News , Trending News , Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.