Joe Biden not a stranger to India: Jaishankar harkens to ambassadorship during Obama days

On a day when Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke with US President-elect Joe Biden for the first time since the US elections, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Tuesday exuded confidence that ties between India and the US will expand further under Biden's administration. Jaishankar noted that he was part of the period when bilateral relations underwent a radical transformation.

"As Vice President, we dealt with him. I happened to be the ambassador during the last phase of the Obama administration. We'd known him earlier when he was in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as the ranking Democratic member and then as the chairman," Jaishankar said. The External Affairs Minister was speaking at an online discussion organised by leading think-tank Gateway House.

'Biden is not a stranger'

"He (Biden) is very much part of this period when Indo-American relations underwent a radical transformation, which I reasonably date back to (Bill) Clinton's visit," Jaishankar said. Jaishankar said "President-elect Biden is not a stranger" to India or to the relationship between the two countries.

"I am very confident that we will pick up where we left off, we have done that over the last four administrations. I think that will be the case as well here and I also say that because within the American politics, it's not just that we deal with the administration of the day, we also tend to deal with the Congress," Jaishankar said. "American politics by its nature has very strong elements of bipartisanship," he said.

Biden is known to be a strong proponent of closer India-US ties since his days as a senator in the 1970s and played a key role in getting the approval of the Senate for the bilateral civil nuclear deal in 2008. In August 2001, Biden, as a chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wrote a letter to the then-President George W Bush calling for the removal of sanctions against India, PTI reported. In the midst of hectic negotiations between the two countries to conclude the civil nuclear deal, Biden was a critical ally for India in the Senate.

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'Discussed our shared priorities and concerns'

Meanwhile, PM Modi and Biden discussed the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region, while reiterating their firm commitment to the strategic bilateral partnership. This was the first interaction between the two leaders after Democrat Biden defeated incumbent president Donald Trump in the US presidential election.

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(With agency inputs)