External affairs minister S Jaishankar and US secretary of state Antony Blinken on Thursday discussed ways to strengthen the bilateral strategic partnership and joint efforts to expand strategic technology and defense industrial cooperation.
The two leaders met on the sidelines of the G20 foreign ministers meeting, which was dominated by tensions over the Ukraine crisis. Blinken arrived in New Delhi late on Wednesday night after a visit to several Central Asian states.
There was no immediate readout from the Indian side on the meeting. Jaishankar said in a tweet that his talks with Blinken were an opportunity to “review bilateral ties and discuss global issues” but didn’t give details.
The meeting assumed significance in view of the continuing US-China tensions and the dragging military standoff between India and China in the Ladakh sector of the Line of Actual Control (LAC).
US state department spokesperson Ned Price said Blinken and Jaishankar discussed ways to strengthen the India-US strategic partnership. “They spoke about shared efforts to elevate and expand strategic technology and defence industrial cooperation, promote food, energy and global health security, clean energy transition, counter-narcotics cooperation, and women’s economic empowerment,” he said.
Blinken and Jaishankar also discussed how to mitigate the global impacts of “Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine”, bilateral cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, the launch of the initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET) and regional issues, Price added.
Blinken told a media briefing that he works closely with Jaishankar to elevate the strategic partnership in concrete ways. The US is supporting India’s very ambitious G20 agenda while also taking forward iCET, he added.
While responding to a question on whether the US has concerns about the status of democracy and human rights issues in India, Blinken said India and the US, as the world’s two biggest democracies, are committed to an “enduring project” of striving to form a more perfect union.
“We have to work together to show that our democracies can actually deliver on our peoples’ needs, and we have to continue to hold ourselves to our core values, including respect for universal human rights like freedom of religion and belief, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, which makes our democracy stronger,” Blinken said.
The US side regularly engages with Indian counterparts to “encourage the Indian government to uphold its commitments to protect human rights” and this issue also figures in most of his conversations with Jaishankar, Blinken said.
Blinken was also asked about restrictions placed by India on US and foreign NGOs and rights organisations. He said the US side has taken up these questions in the past and “discussed the importance of NGOs and civil society being able to function effectively and freely” in both countries