Don't miss

Monday, July 22, 2013

News : Joe Biden's Visit - visions and expectations

In :


United States Vice President Joe Biden will be arriving in New Delhi on Monday evening for probably the first-ever structured and substantive bilateral visit (22-25 July) as he is set to unveil a decades-long vision of close Indo-US strategic partnership and discuss measures of taking bilateral trade from the current $100 billion to $500 billion.

But before we get down to examining the purpose of Biden’s India visit, the agenda and the expected outcome, here are a few fact checks.

American Vice Presidents have rarely visited the Indian sub-continent. Since India’s independence, only two Vice Presidents of the United States have visited India. The first one was way back in 1966 when Hubert Humphrey visited New Delhi and that visit was followed by George HW Bush who visited India as Vice President in 1984.

Neither of the two visits created waves for bilateral reasons. Humphrey’s India visit took place more out of diplomatic protocol to attend the funeral of Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri. However, Humphrey’s brief visit triggered international news headlines as he was closeted with the then Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin who was representing the Soviet Union at the funeral.

Joe Biden will be correcting an important anomaly in Indo-US bilateral relations by embarking on a major visit to India and discussing core policy issues covering a wide gamut of bilateral, regional and international subjects of mutual interest.

This vice-presidential visit promises to be the most important event in Indo-US bilateral engagement since President Barack Obama came to India in November 2010 and announced a major policy shift of American support to India’s candidature for permanent membership of the United Nations.

This conclusion can safely be drawn from a very extensive background teleconference call organized by the White House on 19 July, announcing Biden’s visit to India and Singapore. Interestingly, all the questions were India-specific and not a single question was asked about the Singapore leg of Biden’s two-nation tour, prompting a senior Obama administration official to provide information about his engagements in Singapore suo moto...



Latest News

LOADING LATEST NEWS....
Loading Blog Posts...


Loading Images...
Loading Videos...


Updated at: Monday, July 22, 2013

0 comments:

Post a Comment