US National Security Advisor (NSA) Jake Sullivan on Monday (January 6) met Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar.
Sullivan is on a two-day visit to India to hold talks with Jaishankar and his Indian counterpart Ajit Doval. He is also expected to call upon Prime Minister Narendra Modi and hold a session with Indian entrepreneurs.
Sullivan’s visit comes within two weeks of Jaishankar’s visit to the United States in which the two top officials met. During Jaishankar’s visit, he also met US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US President-elect Donald Trump’s NSA-designate Mike Waltz.
This is expected to be the last high-level engagement between the outgoing Joe Biden administration of the United States and the Indian government. Trump, who won the US presidential election in a landslide, will assume office on January 20.
During his visit, Sullivan will co-chair a meeting of the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET) with Doval, according to Hindustan Times.
The iCET is the bilateral mechanism between India and the United States to expand technology partnerships and defence industrial cooperation between their governments, businesses, and academic institutions in the domains of emerging, critical, and strategic technologies. The initiative was launched by President Biden and Prime Minister Modi in 2022.
The iCET meeting will be the third such meeting that Sullivan and Doval will co-chair. Previously, Sullivan had travelled to India for the second meeting of iCET in June 2024.
The visuals of the meeting between Sullivan and Jaishankar appeared in the media on Monday.
Beside the hi-tech cooperation, Sullivan’s meetings are also expected to cover the Chinese regime’s development of dams in the region bordering India, according to Reuters.
Last month, China approved the construction of a dam on the Brahmaputra river in occupied Tibet region close to the border with India. The dam is expected to be the largest in the world. It is located close to the point where the river makes a ‘u-turn’ to enter India from Tibet. There are concerns that China may weaponise the flow of water with the creation of the dam.
Ahead of Sullivan’s visit, a senior US official told Reuters that such a dam “can have really potentially damaging” effects on downstream countries like India.
“We’ve certainly seen in many places in the Indo-Pacific that upstream dams that the Chinese have created, including in the Mekong region, can have really potentially damaging environmental but also climate impacts on downstream countries,” said the senior US official.
The news agency further reported that topics such as civilian nuclear cooperation, artificial intelligence, space, military licensing, and Chinese economic overcapacity will be discussed during the visit.
In a statement ahead of Sullivan’s visit, the White House said that Sullivan will visit the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT-D), and meet young Indian entrepreneurs and talk about the progress India and the United States have made to strengthen innovation under iCET.
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US NSA Sulivan meets Jaishankar on India visit, talks to cover tech cooperation & Chinese dams
