Foreign Desk Report
NEW YORK: US President-elect Joseph Biden is most likely to pay more attention to India’s “contentious” domestic developments, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-wing party is becoming overtly hostile toward Muslim minorities, but at the same time continue to expand Washington-Delhi ties, according to American foreign policy experts.
The outgoing Trump administration had significantly invested in its relationship with India over the past four years, seeing the country as a crucial partner in counterbalancing the rise of China, The New York Times said in a dispatch, citing experts.
Military cooperation and a personal friendship between President Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi both domineering nationalists have pushed New Delhi and Washington closer, it was pointed out. Now, as Biden is set to move into the White House, American diplomats, Indian officials and security experts are resetting their expectations for relations between the two countries. Some experts, according to the Times, were of the view that the United States cannot afford to drastically alter its policy toward New Delhi because the US needs its help to counter China and increasingly values India as a military and trade partner.
“Most experts agree that China will be the driving force behind how India’s relationship with Washington morphs in a Biden administration,” the report said. “We need India for various reasons,” Ashley Tellis, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think-tank was quoted as saying. “Most important of which is balancing Chinese power in Asia.”
This year, 20 Indian soldiers were killed in the worst border clash between India and China in decades, for which New Delhi was reportedly held responsible.
As relations between New Delhi and Beijing soured, India strengthened its commitment to a multilateral partnership with the United States, India, Japan and Australia known as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, the Times pointed out. China has criticized this forum, calling it as an Asian version of the NATO.
Biden, who once spoke optimistically of China’s emergence “as a great power,” has become increasingly tough on Beijing, and the Times, citing some analysts, said his administration would most likely use the Quad as a way to ensure that the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region does not tilt too far toward China.
