Indo-US ties will pick up, Joe Biden no stranger to India: S Jaishankar

The Indian government will face no problems in taking forward ties with the US under the Joe Biden administration because of the strong element of bipartisan support for the bilateral relationship, external affairs minister S Jaishankar said on Tuesday.

“I am very confident that we will pick up where we left off (with the Donald Trump administration), we have done that over the last four administrations,” Jaishankar said while participating in an online discussion organised by the think tanks Centre for International Governance Innovation and Gateway House.

“I think that will be the case as well here and I say that because within the American politics, it’s not just that we deal with the administration of the day, we also tend to deal with the Congress. American politics by its nature has very strong elements of bipartisanship,” he said.

President-elect Biden is “not a stranger to India or to the relationship” and India has dealt with him in his former roles as vice president in the Barack Obama administration and as ranking Democratic member and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jaishankar said.

“He (Biden) is very much part of this period when Indo-American relations underwent a radical transformation, which I reasonably date back to former President Bill Clinton’s visit to India in 2000,” he said.

“You had four presidents and you really cannot find more dissimilar people – Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. But one issue and one relationship to which all of them were committed was the Indian relationship,” he added.

There is a “very strong element of structural predictability and a certain ballast” in the India-US relationship, Jaishankar said, adding that both countries are natural partners.

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