US President Joe Biden’s reluctance towards accepting Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s invitation to preside over India's Republic Day on January 26, 2024, may be construed as a minor speed bump in increasingly warm India-US ties.
With the US President’s visit now said to be not on, the Quad Summit planned for the day after Republic Day is also being pushed back, presumably at least until the polls are over in India in the summer.
Mr Biden is said to be engrossed with his fourth and last State of the Nation address to be delivered in early February as President in this term. And even more preoccupied with the anticipated presidential election in November 2024 between the incumbent President and former President Donald Trump which, according to pollsters, is going to be very tight with both candidates showing streaks of vulnerability on multiple grounds.
India, seen in Washington as a democratic counterweight to autocratic China, was being assiduously cultivated as an ally not only in the bilateral sphere but also invited to join the strategic alliance Quad, comprising the US, Australia, Japan and India and whose main objective was to assert the democratic nations’ presence in the Pacific and Indian Ocean areas.
Reading between the lines, it might appear the current time is to be considered a short pause in several diplomatic initiatives India and the US have launched, including cyber cooperation with Taiwan as the third nation in an area that is proving to have a crucial bearing on how nations, their corporates and individuals function smoothly in the IT era.
The surfacing of charges against India of being a party to an assassination bid on dual US and Canadian national, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, might have upset the ties that were going swimmingly until the issue of the killing of Khalistan proponent Hardeep Singh Nijjar came up with the US having shared intelligence on it with Canada.
India did respond to the US charges involving the “Pannun plot” with a lot more seriousness than it did when it brushed away Canada’s allegations about the Nijjar killing. It is up to India, which has set up a probe panel into the Pannun controversy, to speedily clear up the issue to put its ties back on the higher plane they were on in most of the last two years.
