Effectively ending a decade-long boycott and an ignominious visa ban, US President Barack Obama has lauded Narendra Modi on the Bhartiya Janta Party’s landslide electoral victory and invited him to visit the United States.
As the stunning scale of the victory unfolded, Obama called Modi late on Friday night to personally congratulate him and invite him to “visit Washington at a mutually agreeable time to further strengthen our bilateral relationship”.
“The President noted he looks forward to working closely with Modi to fulfill the extraordinary promise of the US-India strategic partnership, and they agreed to continue expanding and deepening the wide-ranging cooperation between our two democracies,” said a White House statement. Terming it as “historic” election, the Obama administration said this national exercise “saw more voters cast their ballots freely and fairly than in any election in human history”. In a sense, Obama was left with little choice but to pick up the phone late on Friday itself as several world leaders, including British Prime Minister David Cameron, had already called Modi to greet him on his electoral feat.
Seeing the writing on the wall, Obama administration had earlier this week put out a statement, announcing that it looked forward to “working closely with India’s next administration to make the coming years equally transformative”.
Ahead of Obama’s telephone call, his Secretary of State John Kerry turned to the Twitter to congratulate Modi and BJP. “look forward to working w/you/growing shared prosperity/security w/world’s largest democracy,” Kerry had tweeted.From Capitol Hill, Senator Mark Warner, the Democratic co-chair of the Senate India Caucus, came out with a similar message, aimed at working with the new Government to move the US-India relationship forward.