A RELATIONSHIP BUILT ON RESPECT
Biden and Modi’s alliance based on pragmatic needs, scrappy pasts
Washington — No one would mistake them for best of friends.
But U.S. President Joe Biden, the son of blue-collar Scranton, Pa., and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who rose from tea seller’s son to premier, have developed a relationship based on mutual respect of their scrappy backgrounds and a pragmatism about the shared challenges their two countries face.
Biden is hosting Modi for a state visit this week as he looks to tighten his relationship with the leader of a nation of 1.4 billion that the U.S. administration sees as a pivotal force in Asia for decades to come. The pomp-filled visit will mark the two leaders’ 10th in-person or virtual engagement since Biden became president in 2021. They’re expected to meet again in September in India at the Group of 20 summit.
The U.S.-India relationship is complicated. There are deep differences over Russia’s war in Ukraine and India’s human rights record.
But the frequent engagement between the leaders is seen by both sides as a reflection that, whatever their personal dynamics, Biden and Modi see the U.S.-India relationship as a defining one in the face of an increasingly assertive China and monumental challenges posed by climate change, artificial intelligence, supply chain resilience and other issues.
“They get along well personally, but even more important, I think both realize it is in the interest of the U.S. and India to advance the relationship,” said Arun K. Singh, a former Indian ambassador to the U.S. “For both Biden and Modi, there is a convergence of interests and you can see both leaders are invested personally in moving ties ahead.”
Biden and Modi haven’t developed the sort of tight bond that President Barack Obama had with Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh.
Singh was the first leader Obama honored with a state visit during his presidency. In his post-presidency memoir, “A Promised Land,” Obama heaped praise on the former Indian premier as “wise, thoughtful, and scrupulously honest” and credited him as the “chief architect of India’s economic transformation.”
Nor will Biden and Modi be co-headlining raucous stadium rallies like Modi and President Donald Trump did together in Houston and Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Trump likened Modi to Elvis Presley for his star appeal at a joint rally in Houston in September 2019 that drew about 50,000 people to NRG Stadium. The two leaders more than doubled that crowd about five months later with a massive rally at a cricket stadium. In Ahmedabad, Modi praised Trump as a “unique friend of India,” and Trump called Modi “an exceptional leader.”
Even without big rallies, though, the Biden White House says there is still plenty of evidence that the U.S.-India relationship is growing.
Trade between the U.S. and India in 2022 climbed to a record $191 billion. Through the Quad, an international partnership of the U.S., Australia, India and Japan, the countries launched a plan in 2021 to donate 1.2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines to the Indo-Pacific.
Earlier this year, the two countries launched the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies, which sets the path for collaboration on semiconductor production, developing artificial intelligence, and a loosening of export control rules that could allow U.S. defense contractors to transfer critical technology. U.S.-based General Electric is now awaiting approval from the administration to produce jet engines in India.