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Affordable internet to families in need, new tech to boys and girls clubs, and support to veterans. | |
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| Cox, the Port C-SMAN, as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy. | ||
| Well, up next, India's ambassador to the U.S. speaks on the future of strategic relations between the U.S. and India, the conflict with Pakistan, and the global trade climate during the Trump administration. | ||
| This is hosted by Johns Hopkins University. | ||
| All right. | ||
| As Sanjeev has previewed, we now have something very, very special in store, truly. | ||
| It's my great, great honor to invite to the stage someone who plays a pivotal role in shaping the India-U.S. relationship at the very, very highest level. | ||
| This is genuinely a very, very special occasion for us. | ||
| Ambassador Vinay Mohan Kwatra serves as India's ambassador to the United States. | ||
| His distinguished diplomatic career includes key assignments to cross-trade, foreign policy, and multilateral engagement. | ||
| We don't have enough time to cover his storied career and impact. | ||
| But at a time when global order is rapidly evolving, Ambassador Quattra's leadership is instrumental in strengthening one of the most consequential relationships and partnerships of our time between India and the United States. | ||
| So please join me in giving a very, very warm welcome to His Excellency Ambassador Vinequatra and welcoming him to the stage. | ||
| Good afternoon, Mishkar, to all of you, distinguished dignitaries, guests, students. | ||
| members of the media. | ||
| Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to speak to you this afternoon on the India-U.S. defining partnership for the 21st century. | ||
| Before I do that, I would take this opportunity, take a moment to request all of who you are present here this afternoon to please observe just a moment of silence for the 26 innocent civilians who were brutally killed in a terrorist attack in Pahilgaum in India on 26th of April. | ||
| Just a moment of silence for me in their memory, please. | ||
| Thank you. Thank you very much. | ||
| It's indeed my immense pleasure to speak to you at this inaugural Hopkins India Conference. | ||
| India, as a country, has had a robust history of collaboration with this institution across multiple disciplines. | ||
| Medicine, of course, public health, engineering, data science. | ||
| The collaboration that various institutions in India have had with John Hopkins reflects our shared commitment and priority to address global challenges, combining the scholarship and excellence expertise of this institution with India's talent and scale. | ||
| India-US defining partnership for 21st century is indeed a shared priority, but it is also one of the very few things on which there is a bipartisan consensus in the US, in Washington, among various stakeholders, particularly in the Congress. | ||
| So we are truly blessed that this relationship enjoys very strong bipartisan cross-the-board support. | ||
| I will not go into the history of India-US relationship. | ||
| I will only say that our relationship, what it is today, was not always like this. | ||
| The habits of cooperation that we have cultivated, particularly in the last decade or so, were not always so enduring. | ||
| And the last decade in this context has truly been transformative for our ties. | ||
| When my Prime Minister, Prime Minister Modi, first gave his address to the US Congress in 2014, he clearly said that two countries have overcome, I will quote, the hesitations of history. | ||
| And that's what I meant that in years gone by, our relationship was not of the kind that we enjoy today, that we nurture today. | ||
| We would always be, in a manner of speaking, will be less trusting of each other. | ||
| But of course, not, I would say, since 2000, that the relationship began to take a different direction, more positive direction. | ||
| And my Prime Minister's first speech in the US Congress, when it refers to overcoming the hesitations of history, it essentially points to a period where the two countries, the administrations in the two countries, stakeholders in the two countries are able to level up with each other, speak to each other in very honest and frank terms, | ||
| even if there would be times and subjects on which we might agree to disagree. | ||
| But that has made a very robust and strong foundation to build a truly what we call comprehensive strategic partnership. | ||
| Over the last 10 years, the more time we have spent with each other, the more we have understood each other. | ||
| The more we understood each other, the more we did together. | ||
| And the more we did, the more our partnership grew. | ||
| In a world of flux, which we are all experiencing around us, our two countries have forged a genuine, truly genuine, comprehensive strategic partnership. | ||
| Before I speak to some of the specific pillars of our partnership which are providing impulse and impetus to our ties these days, I would take a moment to single out what at least are some of the key drivers of our partnership, what propels it forward. | ||
| I would say the first and foremost in that category would be the personal drive and momentum that is given to the relationship by the leadership of the two countries, by Prime Minister Modi and by Prime Minister Trump, President Trump. | ||
| The two have to enjoy great friendship and we are very confident that the trajectory of ties will gain great momentum under the supervision, direction and leadership of my Prime Minister and President Trump. | ||
| In President Trump's second administration, Prime Minister Modi paid a very early visit to Washington within the first month of the Presidency assuming charge. | ||
| February 13, Prime Minister was here. | ||
| We moved in quickly to establish a very ambitious agenda of partnership, which spanned across several verticals. | ||
| And I would speak to some of those verticals as I go along. | ||
| But they include defence, technology, naturally trade and economic cooperation, counter-terrorism, energy partnership, critical and emerging technologies, | ||
| enhancing what I would call strategic connectivity, both across the services sector but also across the infrastructure areas and in the process orienting our partnership in a manner that the agenda not only serves our two societies, our two economies, but is also heavily contributory to the regional and the global good. | ||
| Second key driver in my opinion is India's own economic trajectory. | ||
| This is important because in my view the growth trajectory of India will go in parallel with the deepening of the India-US partnership. | ||
| The kind of opportunities that we would expect R2 economies, R2 systems, cooperation between our two nations to throw up would be in many ways directly proportional on the one hand to the speech, the pace, the extent, the breadth and the direction of India's economic growth. | ||
| India is today roughly at about 3.84 trillion. | ||
| Objective is to touch about 7.5 to 8 trillion by the end of this decade. | ||
| As 4 trillion, we are of course a fraction of the US size of the economy. | ||
| Alongside this GDP growth jump from 3.8 to expected about 7.5 to 8 by the end of this decade, there is also strong growth in five or six specific sub-sectors, which is again directly related to the growth in the partnership. | ||
| So one of them is capital growth, for example, naturally very essential for India's rapid growth. | ||
| Credit growth within our required for a strongly growing economy. | ||
| Consumption growth, which then drives, puts a very strong impetus to the domestic growth part of our GDP. | ||
| Industry, talent and services, in a way growing individually, but also growing as a composite, one feeding into the other. | ||
| Very strong agricultural sector, very robust digital and the innovation ecosystem. | ||
| But a digital and an innovation system that prioritizes value creation instead of wealth creation, precisely because one of the primary objectives of building a robust digital ecosystem and the innovation ecosystem is to be able to fulfill the governance needs of the population. | ||
| So that gives a very broad base to it, both in terms of the development of digital platforms, but also in terms of building applications on them, which would actually be relevant not just for our society, but which would also open up a very strong template of partnership and cooperation with our global partners in this particular case, the United States. | ||
| The third driver, in my view, would be the shared interest and priorities of the two countries, both in terms of opportunities that we want to harness, but also in terms of a common understanding, both economic, but also strategic and geopolitical, that both countries face. | ||
| Fourth, and I think a very important set of drivers I would say combining together would be a very live bridge of people-to-people connect. | ||
| We have roughly 5 million odd Indian diaspora in the US, which forms a very strong, growing, vibrant, and a contributory bridge to the relationship, combining them with the values that both our countries share. | ||
| Value of democracy, value of freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and a genuine understanding of how diverse societies flourish and grow together. | ||
| There are, of course, other important drivers in propelling this relationship forward, but I thought I will give a very foundational base of these four key drivers. | ||
| As you, in your own experience, map individual elements of the relationship, you will find each of those elements somewhere drawing a network connect to these four drivers in one way or another, in a very purposeful and in a very substantive way. | ||
| Let me now turn to some of the key aspects of the India-US partnership. | ||
| I refer to the visit of Prime Minister Modi to Washington in February this year, wherein we crafted a very ambitious agenda for the relationship, which would be able to build on the foundations, layers of the previous relationships that we have built across different administrations. | ||
| Each administration gives us a foundation on which we build a new foundation with the next administration, and then with the succeeding administrations, every such relationship base has served as a launching pad for the relationship to grow. | ||
| So, the first one on that I would pick up would be the defense and security cooperation. | ||
| This is one pillar of our cooperation that has truly matured over the years, particularly I would say over the last 20 to 25 years. | ||
| And it has today reached a point of very deep trust and strong reliability, which covers in its embed not just the trade of defense platform, | ||
| trading in defense platform, but also a very broad-based deepening of the institutional partnership between the armed forces and the armed systems of the two countries, whether that is joint exercises, logistic support, leading to greater interoperability of the two platforms that the two countries use, naturally intelligence sharing, defense industry ties, and of course, as I said, the trade. | ||
| In about 20-25 years ago, say around 2000, our trade was effectively negligible. | ||
| Defense trade between the two countries was negligible. | ||
| In the last about 20-25 years, our bilateral trade in defense alone has touched about $25 billion, giving a very strong base to partnership through defense procurement. | ||
| But as I said, defense cooperation is not just limited to buying and selling of the defense platform. | ||
| It also extends to a wide range of institutional cooperation, which is now slowly extending to one strong defense technology partnership, a fairly dynamic, fast-growing defense innovation cooperation. | ||
| Equally important, the area where the private sector of the two countries is now coming closer together to partner in the space of defense manufacturing, not just for the Indian market, but also the manufacturing units in India, serving as a supply chain link for the global supply chain value chains of the U.S. large original equipment manufacturers. | ||
| So it's a fairly, you know, there is a certain comprehensive character to the defense cooperation that has emerged over a period of last 20 to 25 years. | ||
| During the visit of Prime Minister and following his meeting with President Trump in the Oval Room, the two countries also rolled out a defense cooperation framework and what we call Acronium Compact. | ||
| It stands for Catalyzing Opportunities for Military Partnership, Accelerated Commerce and Technology. | ||
| In a manner, this captures a sense of what I just detailed a little while ago. | ||
| Beyond defense, but impinging on both our countries' national security, is a very serious issue of terrorism. | ||
| In our case, in India's case, the issue of cross-border terrorism. | ||
| Our countries have built a strong system to fight terrorism, extremism, radicalization, drug trafficking, illegal migration, cybercrime, and more. | ||
| We truly value the cross-border counter-terrorism cooperation that India and U.S. have. | ||
| We all witnessed in the recent horrific attacks, terrorist attacks in Pahelgam and its aftermath. | ||
| India has received overwhelming support from the United States. | ||
| President Trump was one of the, in fact, the first leader to speak to my Prime Minister after the Pahelgam attacks while my Prime Minister was still on his visit to Saudi Arabia. | ||
| He was the first leader to speak to him, to condemn the Pahelgam terror attacks, to offer full support of strong strength behind India, and of course to the condolences for the victims of the Pelgam attack. | ||
| We have also been overwhelmed by the strong bipartisan support that we have received from the Congress. | ||
| Senators, congressmen, in large numbers, and most proactively and most clearly have voiced their condemnation for these terrorist attacks and voiced support for India. | ||
| The incidents like the Pahlgam incidents clearly point to the need for India-U.S. partnership to stand up to the terrorism and clearly convey to the world that there would be zero tolerance for such terrorist attacks and their backers and their supporters who kill innocent civilians, innocent tourists in this case in Pahelga. | ||
| Two, our energy partnership. | ||
| This has also been one of the areas of very strong growth and expansion. | ||
| Value of energy trade has risen quite sharply. | ||
| Also, its dimensions have increased across the domain. | ||
| Again, just about a decade or so ago, our bilateral trade was energy trade was effectively close to zero, quite negligible. | ||
| Compared to that, today we stand at about $15 billion just in energy trade. | ||
| And again, an area of very rapid growth. | ||
| We are expecting this to increase by at least another $5 to $10 billion in coming years. | ||
| The question of energy from our perspective, which actually links in very well with our cooperation, is one relating to energy access, reliable energy access, affordable energy access, and two, relating to energy security. | ||
| And these two things, when you combine in terms of how they relate to India's large needs of India's fast-growing economy, this forms a base for our strong energy partnership, both in the conventional areas of energy, such as oil and gas trade, but also in case of the new and emerging areas of energy partnership, such as renewables, civil nuclear cooperation. | ||
| We are moving very rapidly to give practical shape to our cooperation in the civil nuclear space. | ||
| Third, during the Prime Minister's visit, we also launched the initiative which we call as TRUST, standing for transforming the relationship utilizing strategic technology. | ||
| Now, this is a very crucial area and an emerging area of partnership between our two economies, between the technology ecosystems of the two countries, and I would say to a very large extent between the scientific and research institutions between the two countries. | ||
| And the objective of this particular initiative is to focus on critical emerging technologies across five or six key areas. | ||
| So defense is one, artificial intelligence is another, and artificial intelligence not just limited to our cooperation in trying to see if we can shape foundational language learning models together, | ||
| but also to see whether we can cooperate on the practical aspects of AI, whether they relate to agentic AI, building agents for AI, or building application layers on the foundational layers, which could be either relevant for the diverse economic ecosystem that India has, although it includes a lot of structured and unstructured data, | ||
| but also to some of the domains particularly which lend itself to stronger use of artificial intelligence. | ||
| I would say, for example, a pharmaceuticals, auto sector. | ||
| Semiconductors has been a strong area of cooperation, I would say, in the last two to three years, considering that India has moved from pretty much having very incipient kind of semiconductor ecosystem to India now going into building the legacy node fabs of 28 nanometers and above and also building associated ecosystem for the semiconductor area, | ||
| whether it's assembly test packaging, the memory space, or the design ecosystem that goes along in the semiconductor space. | ||
| Quantum, still mostly in the research space, biotechnology, energy that I mentioned, and a very robust dynamic cooperation in the field of space. | ||
| So trust initiative is a fitting indicator of how we see the future direction of this relationship, which will build on the existing domains of cooperation and lend itself, really lend itself to building a very strong and robust agenda in these areas in the years ahead in our bilateral partnership. | ||
| A related area, I would say, the fourth area part of Jinda which we thrashed out was to we launched what we call as innovation bridge, links not just to the defense and the security template of our cooperation, but also links to other areas of our economic cooperation. | ||
| And the central feature of this would be to build industry and academic partnership and link those partnership to investments, both private sector investments, but also government sector's investments in the field of space, energy and other emerging technologies that I just mentioned in trust initiatives. | ||
| So a lot of what we would do in innovation links and networks very neatly to whatever initiatives we design and take under the trust initiatives. | ||
| And this is one space where institutions like Hopkins with cutting-edge research can be among the most valuable partners that India seeks, that the institutions in India seek. | ||
| Beyond these key areas of our bilateral engagement, we are also a very strong partner in some of the regional settings. | ||
| The most important of them include initiative Quad, again, looking at both opportunities and the strategic challenges that we face. | ||
| I2U2, basically standing for India, Israel, US and UAE, and IMAC, India Middle East Economic Corridor. | ||
| Again, a domain of strategic connectivity bringing together multiple nations to build connectivity in a manner that not only promotes trade, business and economic cooperation, but also allows us to build a strategic pathway to a very stronger coming together of nations on this corridor and naturally the rest of the economic ecosystem that goes with it. | ||
| Sixth, I would say, put it as a last one, maybe penultimate one, links to one of the drivers which I mentioned earlier on, which is the people to people ties. | ||
| As I said, we have around 5 million strong Indian diaspora. | ||
| We have close to 350,000 Indian students in the United States. | ||
| And these form really live examples of the strong bond of friendship between our two countries. | ||
| But alongside, they are also a force multiplier in the relationship. | ||
| They are also in a way a guarantee and a resilient guarantee for our future partnerships. | ||
| The imprint of Indian diaspora is quite strong. | ||
| You know, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, we all know some of the names, they are very popular. | ||
| Eminent researchers, medical professionals, I'm sure many of you are present here this afternoon. | ||
| Technocrats, the whole strength of, I would say, the entrepreneurial spirit that the Indian diaspora brings, not just in the business segment, but also on the services sector, some of which I mentioned. | ||
| Innovation, which they drive, drive both, of course, in the respective professions that they follow in the US, but they also lend a very strong hand to the growth of innovation ecosystem in India. | ||
| So that's, as I said, is a truly valuable proposition. | ||
| But also in the process, framing solutions that are relevant for the rest of the world also. | ||
| This, I would say, in a way, forms a very, you know, a compact set of five, six areas, which, if you begin to flesh out, then evolve into a very large individual sets of specific cooperative activities that the two countries in the two systems are able to do. | ||
| Finally, and of course, I'm talking about trade at the end for a reason. | ||
| Our economic and trade ties have truly grown tremendously. | ||
| United States is today India's largest trading partner. | ||
| It's the largest capital partner. | ||
| It's the largest technology partner for India. | ||
| Our trade currently stands at close to $200 billion. | ||
| The talent pool that India has and the technology frontier technology lead that the US has, they complement each other really well. | ||
| And as our businesses, as our talent tap into these mutual strengths and combine it with robust two-way flows of technology and capital, these three triangulate to create really a very strong business-to-business cooperation realities, I would say. | ||
| Indian investments also in the U.S. have grown considerably, close to 50 billion. | ||
| Given that India, as such, is a capital-importing nation. | ||
| This is a considerably strong investment that the Indian companies have made in the U.S., generating close to half a million jobs. | ||
| And U.S. investments in India are also commensurately very large with generating a large employment base in India. | ||
| Both sides are also working very intensely for an expeditious conclusion of a bilateral trade agreement, the first tranche of the bilateral trade agreement, with the objective to expand market access, cut tariffs, and open up the barriers, link up supply chains more tightly, with the whole objective that we can layer this to build the next take next steps, | ||
| take stronger steps to broadbase and build new economic relations between the two countries. | ||
| I think if you look at the overall technology, capital, robust economic ecosystems of the U.S., and you look at what India brings to the table, you will find that the two economies are highly complementary. | ||
| We are not competitive economies, whether it is the services or the manufacturing sector. | ||
| And I think that provides a very strong value base for our long-term strategic partnership. | ||
| To wrap up, our relationship is bigger than its pieces. | ||
| It's a proof what our two nations, diverse yet highly synergetic, comprehensive strategic partners, can achieve together. | ||
| As we pursue our own interests and strengthen our partnerships on region global fronts, we are in a position to do a world of good, not just for ourselves, our two countries, our two economies, our two societies, but also for the rest of the world. | ||
| I would like to thank the Institute, Hopkins, once again and wish this conference only the very best in your proceedings. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| I'll look now at the India-Pakistan conflict and trade relations with the U.S., including India's impact on technology and education. | ||
| This is part of Johns Hopkins University's inaugural India Conference. |