WASHINGTON: Some of the steps being taken by Beijing along the India-China border has been “provocative”, a top White House official has said while reaffirming that the United States is “destined” to work more closely with India.
Kurt Campbell, the Deputy Assistant to the US President and Coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, told a Washington-based think-tank on Thursday that India is not an ally of the US and will never be so. “But it does not mean that we will not be close partners and share many things. That’s how we need to understand the role that India will play as a great nation on the global stage. We want to encourage that and support that and deepen this relationship, which is already very strong, probably the strongest people-to-people relationship of any country that the US has on the global stage,” he said.
Campbell said the India-US relationship was the most important bilateral relationship for the US in the 21st century. The think tank Centre for a New American Security (CNAS) in a report said that the India-China border intrusions and clashes had become more frequent and threaten to lead to all-out conflict. The increased prospect of India-China border hostility had implications for the US and its Indo-Pacific strategy between the two Asian giants, it said.
Chinese attempts to unilaterally alter the status quo along the LAC starting April-May 2020 seriously disturbed the peace in border areas , the Ministry of External Affairs said this month.