This opinion was first published on news18.com | JUNE 24, 2023.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Joe Biden’s ‘jugalbandi’ in Washington has inaugurated a new age of America-India relations. As the prime minister put it during his address to the joint session of the US Congress: “In the past few years, there have been many advances in AI — Artificial Intelligence. At the same time, there have been more momentous developments in another AI — America and India.”
Going beyond the semantics, which got a standing ovation from US lawmakers, this evocative phrasing reflected the seismic nature of the shift underfoot in India-US relations that this visit bookends.
The visit heralds an epochal shift in the relationship between the world’s largest democracy and its most powerful one at multiple levels. The sweeping ambition of the strategic partnership — from technology to defence to a wider strategic convergence — is unprecedented in the bilateral relationship between Delhi and Washington.
- Tech cooperation was once a small sidenote in the India-US relationship. It is now at the forefront. Ranging from quantum computing to AI to cybersecurity to outer space, this new focus on a strategic partnership on high tech and commerce has the potential to completely transform the relationship with wider implications for the global tech architecture.
At just the moment when China-oriented global supply chains are being reconfigured, this new focus on technology cooperation between India and US has huge implications.
It is not an accident that the India-US joint statement released after the meeting between Prime Minister Modi and Biden started with a section on “Charting a Technology Partnership for the Future.” Reflecting the new emphasis, the statement mentioned the words ‘technology’ or ‘technologies’ as many as 43 times.
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This opinion was first published on news18.com | JUNE 24, 2023.