Economic linkages at core of strategic relationship, Modi’s visit historic: Blinken

Economic linkages are the heart of the India-United States strategic relationship, US Secretary of State Antony J Blinken said on Monday adding.

That both countries are together determining the norms, rules and standards that will govern innovations for the future.

Blinken said Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s official visit to Washington DC on June 22 will be “historic” and solidify what President Joe Biden has called the “defining relationship” of the 21st Century.

As someone who has worked for Biden for two decades, dating back to the Democrat President’s time as chair of Senate foreign relations committee, Blinken said he knew Biden had not arrived at this conclusion “yesterday”.

“From that time, I know the premium he has attached to the relationship between our countries and the vision that he has had for the centrality, the importance, of that relationship,” he said.

Blinken was speaking at the inaugural reception of the India Ideas Summit, hosted by the US-India Business Council (USIBC), on Monday evening (eastern time). Held at Renwick Gallery, right opposite the White House in downtown DC, the event saw high-level participation from the US government.

Guests included US special envoy for energy affairs Amos Hochstein, deputy national security adviser Anne Neuberger, State department officials for South Asia, Donald Lu and Nancy Jackson, Pentagon’s Lindsay Ford, the energy department’s Geoffrey Pyatt, among others.

Indian ambassador to the US, Taranjit Singh Sandhu, and USIBC president Atul Keshap too spoke at the event, where representatives of top US and Indian companies with business interests in each other’s countries were also present.

“We see the importance of the partnership in a shared commitment to address regional and global challenges – promoting health security, working with our Quad partners to build a free, open, secure, prosperous Indo-Pacific where people, where goods, where ideas can travel freely and rules are applied fairly,” Blinken said, adding that he had seen India’s “constructive leadership” on the issues in the past two-and-a-half years and as chair of the G20.

Suggesting that economic ties were at the heart of the strategic relationship, Blinken highlighted the $191-billion-dollar US-India trade last year, the US investment of over $54 billion in India and Indian investment of over $40 billion in the US, and India joining three pillars of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) as evidence of growing economic ties.

He spoke of the convergence on supply chain diversification, the progress under the initiative on critical and emerging technologies (ICET) and the intense people-to-people ties. Blinken also quoted a Gujarati entrepreneur from North Carolina — from a ground report in HT published in March — suggesting this was unimaginable 15 years ago.