Obama dials Modi in farewell call, reviews cooperation efforts
WASHINGTON: US president Barack Obama spoke with PM Narendra Modi on Wednesday as he called world leaders he worked with over his years in the White House to thank them for their partnership and bid them farewell.
Obama and Modi had developed what officials on both sides concurred a good working relationship. They spoke regularly and met frequently.
On the farewell call, the White House said in a statement, Obama and Modi reviewed “joint efforts of cooperation including defence, civil nuclear energy, and enhanced people-to-people ties”. The President spoke of his visit as chief guest at the Indian Republican Day celebrations in 2015 — when his chewing gum made as much news as his presence — and extended congratulations ahead of India’s upcoming 68th Republic Day anniversary. “Both leaders discussed the progress they have made on shared economic and security priorities, including recognition of India as a Major Defence Partner of the US and addressing the global challenge of climate change,” the White House added.
From their first meeting in September 2014, at the White House, when Obama greeted Modi in Gujarati, they developed an easy working relationship, calling each other by their first names in public, a routine western practice but rare for an Indian leader. Obama was, in fact, among the first word leaders to call Modi on his election in 2014, when he invited the PM to visit the US, ending in one stroke weeks of speculation about how Modi will travel to US, having being denied a visa in 2005. They would go on to meet frequently, almost twice or more on the sidelines of world meetings of the US and multilateral meetings, with three bilateral state visits, two in Washington DC — 2014 and 2016 — and one in New Delhi in 2015.
Before their September 2014 meeting, the two leaders also co-authored an op-ed in The Washington Post titled, “Chalen Saath Saath: Forward, we go together”.
The joint statement issued after their meeting the next day covered all the usual points the two sides like to see, and went beyond. It called, for the first time, for all parties in the South China Sea dispute to resolve their differences amicably. That led to speculation of the two countries considering joint naval patrol in those waters in an obvious challenge to the Chinese, who have litigated their case in the region with unbridled aggression.