San Francisco: More than three weeks after Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Joe Biden announced a slew of big-ticket defence deals during the former’s visit to the US, a senior official from the US State Department expressed confidence that the deals will work towards diversifying India’s imports of military equipment away from Russia.
Speaking to a select group of journalists this week and without explicitly mentioning Moscow, Melisa Doherty, Director, Office of Security and Transnational Affairs, US Department of State, said: “We want India to be able to diversify its military equipment. We are also looking at larger military cooperation including co-production.”
Russia continues to be India’s largest arms supplier, followed by France.
However, during PM Modi’s visit to the US this June, New Delhi announced its intention to purchase General Electric engines for fighter jets and a $3 billion deal for 31 Predator drones for the Indian Army, Navy and Air Force.
Experts viewed the latest deals as building on the civil nuclear agreement signed between former Indian PM Manmohan Singh and former US President George Bush in 2005.
In a joint statement issued on 22 June, Washington and New Delhi committed their administrations to promoting policies that facilitate greater technology sharing, co-development and co-production opportunities between industry, government and academic institutions.
“We do feel that India should have a diverse supply chain in its efforts to maintain its own territorial integrity and security,” added Doherty.
This comes at a time when India continues to share a tense border relationship with China, which remains unresolved since the 2020 Galwan Valley clash.
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Dual factors
Experts seem to indicate that while it is important to bolster India as a counter weight to China’s increasingly aggressive behaviour in the Indo-Pacific, diversification of its military equipment away from Moscow is the priority.
“I think it’s both. It’s mainly about bolstering the relationship (between India and the US) and in the process help India diversify its military equipment,” Scot Marciel, former US ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, told ThePrint.
Meanwhile, Anja Manuel, executive director of foreign policy institutes Aspen Strategy Group and Aspen Security Forum, indicated that though India and the US may never be “formal allies”, the China worry is what unites them.
“The US and India are very close partners and getting ever closer. We’ll never be formal allies but we see the ‘China worry’ in a very similar way,” she told ThePrint.
Manuel added: “We both have huge trade relationships with China. I think there’s a lot of convergence which you are now seeing between US and Indian foreign policy.”
Despite the ongoing border stand-off, India and China’s bilateral trade boomed in the last two years but was reported to have seen a decline in the first half of 2023, mainly owing to China’s economic slowdown.
Similarly, the US and China, despite their trade war and geopolitical tensions, reported a record-high $690.6 billion in bilateral trade last year, overtaking a previous record in 2018 of $658.8 billion, according to data published earlier this year by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis.
However, due to China’s slowdown, Beijing’s share of US goods imports reportedly took a hit in the first four months of 2023, dropping to 13.3 per cent.
(The reporter was part of a media delegation to the US hosted by the US State Department’s Foreign Press Centers)
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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