NEW DELHI // The US secretary of state John Kerry on Thursday began a mission to build ties with a new Indian government, but fresh rifts over trade and spying cast a shadow.
On his first visit since India’s April-May elections, Mr Kerry said he was “excited” about new Prime Minister Narendra Modi and believed his “historic mandate” offered a chance for new US-India cooperation.
“The moment has never been more ripe to deliver on the incredible possibilities of the relationship between our nations,” Mr Kerry said after talks with key ministers.
“The United States and India can and should be indispensable partners for the 21st century.”
India’s foreign minister, Sushma Swaraj, said the Modi government saw “great potential for the United States as a global partner” and would welcome a “much more robust American presence” in the long-closed Indian economy.
Mr Kerry arrived in Delhi late on Wednesday for a three-day visit that also aims to lay the groundwork ahead of Mr Modi’s own trip to the US in September.
Mr Kerry is scheduled to meet Mr Modi on Friday. On Thursday, he met India’s defence and finance minister Arun Jaitley, before touring a campus of the Indian Institute of Technology, one of India’s top engineering colleges.
Later in the day, he co-chaired the fifth India-US strategic dialogue alongside Ms Swaraj. The dialogue, which discusses cooperation across a gamut of sectors ranging from energy to education, began during the tenure of former US president George W Bush but was formally re-initiated by president Barack Obama in 2010.
Part of Mr Kerry’s implicit agenda is to build ties with Mr Modi – a man whom the United States held complicit in deadly anti-Muslim riots during his chief ministership of Gujarat in 2002, and who was thus denied a visa to visit America. The United States has, since Mr Modi’s election, assured India that he would now receive a visa.
Mr Kerry said after his arrival that he was eager to strengthen ties with India in general, given how temperamental the relationship has been over the past few years.
“We want a new relationship,” he told the NDTV channel. “We want to see things move in a very positive way ... We are excited about prime minister Modi’s direction ... We think there’s a lot that the United States and India can work on together.”
Trade between India and America has increased almost fivefold since 2000, to more than US$96 billion (Dh352.6bn) in 2013. India has invested a total of $9bn in the US, while the US has invested nearly $28bn in India.
But relations have been strained by other factors: a fracas over the arrest of a junior Indian diplomat in New York last year; India’s slowness in accommodating American commercial interests; and the revelations that America’s National Security Agency snooped on Indian entities, including Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Raising the issue at the joint press conference with Mr Kerry, Ms Swaraj said she had told the top US diplomat and his aides that Indians were “angry” about the alleged spying.
“I also told them that if we consider each other friendly countries, it is unacceptable that a friendly country spies on other friendly nations,” she told a joint news conference.
Mr Kerry said he could not comment about specific allegations but he insisted that US President Barack Obama had made “unprecedented” efforts to ensure better oversight of intelligence.
However, trade is likely to top the agenda during Mr Kerry’s visit, which began as a deadline loomed for India to accept a key World Trade Organisation deal that it is insisting on having amended.
“Kerry’s main agenda here will involve boosting trade,” said Pradeep Mehta, a former member of a WTO trade panel and now the secretary general of a Jaipur-based economic research NGO. “But it’s difficult. Both countries have too many red lines.”
The US, for instance, would want enhanced intellectual property protections in a bilateral trade pact with India, Mr Mehta said. But India would resist this because it would restrict its exports of generic drugs to American markets and its imports of cutting-edge defence technology from the US.
In an article in the Economic Times newspaper on Wednesday, Mr Kerry and the US commerce secretary Penny Pritzker wrote that the India-US partnership “is on the cusp of an historic transformation”.
But they also warned India against backing away from the WTO deal that eases trade restrictions. “India must decide where it fits in the global trading system. Its commitment to a rules-based trading order and its willingness to fulfill its obligations will be a key indication.”
This was a reference to a U-turn by Mr Modi’s new government on a WTO trade facilitation agreement that the previous Indian administration had agreed to last December. The agreement streamlines customs regulations and is expected to add a trillion-dollar stimulus to the world economy.
India now seeks to link the implementation of this trade deal to the progress of a food security programme that would allow it to continue providing agriculture subsidies and stockpile food, despite WTO norms to the contrary.
Mr Kerry and Ms Pritzker pressed India to agree to the trade deal before midnight yesterday, when the deadline to bring the trade protocol into the WTO’s framework was due to lapse.
Mr Kerry said on Thurday that the United States was “very sensitive” to India’s needs but that the customs agreement reached in Bali provided adequate safeguards.
“We do not dismiss the concerns India has about large numbers of poor people who require some sort of food assurances,” he said.
Mr Mehta pointed out that deadlines “pass by all the time. If the protocol isn’t passed today, it can be passed next week or next month.”
India’s stand on the WTO deal drew on historical precedent, Mr Mehta said. “Rich countries have always put issues of their interest on the fast track, and the issues of interest to poor countries are not even discussed.”
But he admitted that India’s U-turn had left it isolated. Even other developing countries and peers “such as South Africa quietened down and agreed to the trade deal”.
ssubramanian@thenational.ae