India’s Defence Minister Rajnath Singh on Saturday held a meeting with United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in Delhi, where the two discussed the expansion of their countries’ military engagement. This is Austin’s first official visit to India.
Their meeting took place over a week after Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Joe Biden participated in the first-ever Quad leaders’ summit with their counterparts from Japan and Australia.
“Our discussions today focussed on our wide ranging defence cooperation and expanding military-to-military engagement across services, information sharing, cooperation in emerging sectors of defence, and mutual logistics support,” Singh said after the meeting.
The joint statement added that the US and India were keen to work together to realise the full potential of their Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership. “We reviewed the wide gamut of bilateral and multilateral exercises and agreed to pursue enhanced cooperation with the US Indo-Pacific Command, Central Command and Africa Command,” Singh added.
The defence minister added that India and the US discussed the implementation of defence agreements like Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement, Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement and the Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement.
Singh also spoke about the Quad meeting held on March 12. “The recent Leaders’ Summit of India, USA, Japan and Australia under the Quad framework emphasised our resolve to maintain a free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific region,” he said. “We discussed the need for enhanced capacity building to address some of the non-traditional challenges such as oil spills and environment disasters, drug trafficking, Illegal, Unreported, Unregulated fishing, etc.”
Singh invited American industries to take advantage of India’s relaxed foreign direct investment policies for the defence sector.
The defence minister thanked his US counterpart for travelling to India amid the coronavirus crisis, adding that it showed the “abiding commitment of the United States to our bilateral relationship”.
Austin landed in India on Friday evening. This is the second leg of his Asia tour. Earlier this week, Austin and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited South Korea and Japan.
Austin met Prime Minister Narendra Modi hours after his arrival. In a tweet after the meeting, Modi said that the two countries were committed to their strategic partnership.
Ahead of Austin’s visit to India, the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations had asked him to “raise democracy and human rights concerns” during discussions with the Union government.
A letter from US Senator Bob Menendez, the committee chairperson, took note of the farmers’ protest against the three new agriculture laws and said that the government’s “crackdown” on them and “corresponding intimidation of journalists and government critics only underscores the deteriorating situation of democracy in India”.
The letter also made a mention of India’s downgrade in the recent Freedom House report. India’s status on Freedom House’s report on political rights and civil liberties was lowered to “partly free” in the United States government-funded non-governmental organisation’s annual Freedom in the World rankings. In 2020, the organisation’s report ranked India as “free”.
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