Modi invites Biden to be chief guest at upcoming Republic Day celebrations

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has invited United States President Joe Biden to be the chief guest at the Republic Day ceremony in New Delhi on January 26 next year, the envoy of Washington DC to New Delhi, Eric Garcetti, confirmed on Wednesday.

Garcetti said at an event that the prime minister had extended the invitation to the US president when they had held a bilateral meeting in New Delhi on September 8 – a day before the G20 summit had commenced.

He, however, did not confirm whether New Delhi would also invite Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on the occasion of the Republic Day and simultaneously host a summit of the Quad.

The Quad is a four-nation coalition India forged with the US, Australia and Japan to counter China’s bid to expand its geopolitical and geoeconomic influence in the Indo-Pacific region.

If Biden accepts Modi’s invitation to attend the Republic Day ceremony on the Kartavya Path in New Delhi as the chief guest, he would be the second US president to do so.

Barack Obama was the chief guest at the 2015 Republic Day ceremony in New Delhi.

If New Delhi invites Biden, Kishida and Albanese of Australia for the Republic Day ceremony, it will be the second such occasion when Modi will play host to more than one foreign leader to witness the parade on the Kartavya Path as the chief guests.

India had in 2018 hosted the leaders of the 10 ASEAN (Association of South-East Asian Nations) nations as the chief guests at the Republic Day ceremony in Delhi.

Earlier, New Delhi had two chief guests at the ceremony on January 26 only twice – British Chancellor of Exchequer Rab Butler and the Chief Justice of Japan Kotaro Tanaka in 1956 and chairman of the Soviet Union Council of Ministers, Alexei Kosygin, and Yugoslav President, Josip Broz Tito, in 1968.

When Modi joined Biden, Kishida and Albanese at a meeting on the sideline of the G7 summit at Hiroshima in Japan on May 20, they agreed to hold the next summit of the four-nation bloc in India in 2024.