U.S. President Joe Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi attend a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office of the White House on September 24, 2021 in Washington, DC.
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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will meet President Joe Biden on Thursday for his first meeting state visit to the USA
Deepening defense ties, technology partnerships and India’s role in the Indo-Pacific region might be the highlights of the agenda.
Relations between India and the United States are at a turning point and relations between the two nations have improved in the last decade, said Harsh V. Pant, vice chairman of research and foreign policy at the Observer Research Foundation, a Delhi-based think tank.
“That is a very essential visit, each for India getting to the US and for the US getting to India,” Pant said.
Biden has only hosted two state visits during his presidency, the first along with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron in December 2022 and the second with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol in April.
“This visit symbolizes an unwavering commitment to deepening ties and represents great potential for cooperation between the two countries in the face of world challenges,” said Farwa Aamer, director of South Asia initiatives at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
“For a lot of in India and the United States, this visit is a testament to the promise and high expectations for the way forward for US-Indian cooperation – shared prosperity,” said Aamer.
The US looks to India as a partner they’ll depend on, but their partnership might be very different because India will not be an ally, Pant told CNBC.
“The US will not be used to having partners who will not be allies but want to take a look at its partnership with India in another way – one which is comparatively independent but can even help American priorities,” he said in a telephone interview.
Strengthening defensive ties
India and Russia have long had a steadfast relationship, and India relies heavily on the Kremlin for oil and military weapons.
The South Asian nation is the world’s largest buyer of Russian arms, accounting for about 20% of Russia’s current order, reported Reuters.
“India has been too depending on one country, which will not be good, and while dependency has gone from 80% in the Nineteen Nineties to around 65% today, dependency remains to be huge,” Pant noted.
Nonetheless, due to the war in Ukraine, Russia was unable to send the critical weapons it had promised to India, forcing the Indian military to seek supplies from others – reminiscent of the United States.
Russian President Vladimir Putin with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization leadership summit in Samarkand, September 16, 2022.
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Still, analysts are optimistic that Biden and Modi’s meeting may lead to more gun deals.
India has long been excited about buying SeaGuardian drones from the US, but the expected deal, which could possibly be value between $2 billion and $3 billion, has long been hampered by “bureaucratic hurdles”, reported Reuters.
The deal may yet be brought back to the table.
“India’s Ministry of Defense has reportedly approved the purchase, so it seems likely. The United States would love that to occur,” Manjari Miller, senior fellow for India, Pakistan and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, told CNBC.
“It will be essential for the partnership – only a few military allies and NATO countries have this drone, and the United States is especially excited about who they sell American weapons and technology to.”
She stressed that now’s a very important time for a deal as it is going to bring “India closer to the US defense orbit and is one step away from India’s dependence on Russian weapons and equipment.”
Lisa Curtis, senior lecturer and director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a Latest American Security, India is questioning its strategic options, pondering it could still depend on Russia.
“He wants to try to keep a wedge between Russia and China because he doesn’t want to consider the ideas of Russia and China which are against them. Then you definately throw Pakistan in there and it looks really dire from an Indian perspective,” Curtis said Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The drones can even bolster India’s armed forces with “intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities” that may help the country secure its borders with China and Pakistan, said Karthik Nachippan, a research fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. .
Tensions between India and China over a disputed border in the Himalayan region have been ongoing since the Fifties endlessly. Twenty Indian soldiers were killed in June 2020 in hand-to-hand combat with Chinese troops, followed by one other clash in December 2022.
But India wants to “transcend the buyer-seller relationship” with the US, Pant said, adding that India is working on “co-production and co-development cooperation” with the US to construct its own domestic defense manufacturing base.
Private sectors in the U.S. may additionally start making more significant investments in India, with the two countries expected to collaborate on fighter engine production, Pant said.
“There’s a shift in the way the United States looks at India, and the defense will profit from that. India will definitely seek to reduce its dependence on Russia, and that might be quite an extreme move,” he added.
Not to mention China The White House said in May the visit will “strengthen our two countries’ joint commitment to a free, open, prosperous and secure Indo-Pacific and our shared determination to elevate our strategic technology partnership, including in defense, clean energy and space.”
“Each the United States and India share the common goal of not having a China-dominated Asia or an Indo-Pacific region subject to Chinese coercion and assertiveness,” Ashley Tellis, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, told a Q&A report.
Energy: Dependence on Russian oil
“India has gotten very close to the West in the last 5-10 years, but they understand that they can not just secede from Russia,” said Amit Ranjan, a research fellow at the NUS Institute of South Asian Studies.
“Russia is an old friend of India, and India understands the importance of this relationship … Oil is a very important component of this relationship,” Ranjan said.
Technology: Diversification from China
Technology partnerships can even be a priority in the Modi programme.
“I feel the technology issues have turn into extremely essential as we see China making progress and we hear about China’s advances in AI,” says Curtis.
“Seeing how far China has progressed, the US now understands the importance of really working closely with India and trying to capitalize on strengths on either side,” she said.
“There are such a lot of ways either side can profit from this increased technological collaboration – not to mention the advances which have been made in the field of semiconductors. This has been a real area of interest for India and the US, and I see it only growing as we glance into the future,” added Curtis.
There can even be business meetings with technological leaders.
Modi can be expected to meet with other CEOs including Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and FedEx’s Raj Subramaniam at an official White House dinner on Thursday, CNBC sources told CNBC.
The growing partnership between India and the United States also gives each nations space to adopt a “China plus one” strategy and get more tech corporations to arrange in India, CNBC analysts said.
The US-India Critical and Emerging Technologies Initiative was announced last May. The iCET initiative goals to “strengthen and expand” the two countries’ technology partnership and defense industry cooperation, the White House said in January.
Pant said this shows the willingness of each countries to work together – each on research and development and what the two governments can do together.
In the past six months, more US tech corporations have turned their attention to India.
Individuals are seen at an Apple store after its launch at the Jio World Drive mall in Mumbai, India, April 18, 2023.
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Apple opened two physical retail stores in Delhi and Mumbai in April and plans to expand further in India. from Taiwan Foxconn — one in every of Apple’s largest suppliers — has begun construction of a latest $500 million factory in Telangana.
One sec Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing division, announced in May that it will invest $13 billion in India by the end of this decade, reported Reuters.
“India and the United States are forging a relationship that may meet the challenges of the twenty first century, and China might be watching very closely,” Pant said. “Each countries have already identified their strengths and are developing a very ambitious agenda.”
— Seema Mody of CNBC contributed to this report.