NEW YORK: The United States welcomed Narendra Modi in Washington and President Barack Obama accompanied the Prime Minister Modi to Martin Luther King Jr memorial, the days of Modi being a persona non grata were forgotten and given a quiet burial.
The credit for this goes first to Modi, who showed that he would not let personal belittlement come in the way of very significant bilateral relations between the world’s oldest and largest democracies. He was the first to seize the moment and accept an invitation to visit the US when Obama called to congratulate him on winning an unprecedented mandate in May 2014 general elections.
Now, Modi is returning the favour by extending to the US President a historic invitation to India’s Republic Day programme.
But much has gone into the change of heart between the two nations. From a period when India was on the ‘other side’ of the Cold War, to the time that United States clamped sanctions on India for conducting nuclear tests, the world is a different place.
The United States is the sole superpower of the world, but not in the conventional sense any more. Economically, there is China that can counterbalance it; in terms of challenges – the threat does not come from any once country or bloc but an ideology that breeds terrorism in a loose unstructured way.
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