Will Biden visit India twice before next US Prez polls?
United States President Joe Biden may visit India twice before seeking a second term in the White House in November 2024 elections.
Biden is expected to visit New Delhi to attend the G20 Summit, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi will host on September 9 and 10. This is going to be his first visit to India after taking over as the US president in January 2021. The possibility of his second visit to India emerged on Saturday when he and Modi joined Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan and Anthony Albanese of Australia for a meeting of the Quad on the sideline of the G7 Summit at Hiroshima in Japan.
The next in-person summit of the Quad will be hosted by India in 2024, according to a joint statement issued by the four leaders after the meeting on Saturday.
Barack Obama was the first US President to visit India twice – first in November 2010 during his first term in the White House and then in January 2015 during his second term.
If Biden travels to India for the G20 Summit this year and the Quad Summit next year, he will be the first US President to visit the South Asian nation twice during his first term in the White House itself.
Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump had visited Ahmedabad and New Delhi in February 2020.
The Quad leaders on Saturday only agreed to hold the next year’s in-person summit in India but did not set a specific date for it. Sources in New Delhi, however, said that it might happen before the next Lok Sabha elections, which would take place in April-May 2024, or immediately after that, of course before the US president would have to start campaigning seeking re-election. The next US presidential polls will take place on November 5, 2024.
Modi will travel to Washington D.C. on June 22 for an official state visit on an invitation extended by Biden. His first visit to Washington DC after Biden took over as the US president was in September 2021, when he had attended the first in-person summit of the Quad in the White House.
The Quad is a coalition of India, Australia, Japan and the US. The four-nation coalition was launched in 2007 and revived in 2017 to counter China’s expansionist moves in the Indo-Pacific. It was elevated to the level of the leaders in April 2021, when the leaders of the four nations had held a virtual meeting. They later had summits in Washington DC in September 2021 and in Tokyo in May 2022.
Though the leaders were expected to hold this year’s summit at Sydney on May 23, it was shifted to Hiroshima and advanced to Saturday as Biden cancelled his visit to Australia and decided to return to Washington DC after attending the G7 summit in Japan in order to continue talks with the US Congress leaders to avert looming debt-default.