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Austin urged to raise farmers’ stir, Russian S-400 deal on India visit
Lloyd Austin will reach India on Friday for talks with his counterparts and other officials
Washington Robert Menendez, a Democrat heading the powerful US senate committee on foreign relations, has urged defence secretary Lloyd Austin to raise during his India visit a number of issues that could be uncomfortable for his hosts, such as democratic rights and values in the context of farmer protests and arms purchases from Russia such as the S-400 systems.
Austin will reach India on Friday for talks with his counterparts and other officials. His stated agenda, as previewed by the Pentagon last week, include “deepening the US-India major defence partnership and advancing cooperation between our countries for a free, prosperous and open Indo-Pacific and Western Indian Ocean Region”.
The defence secretary may or may not bring up Menendez’s issues in his meetings in New Delhi, which will be the first India visit by a member of President Joe Biden’s cabinet, but the senior senator’s call for them to be raised points to tough conversations down the road.
Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, urged Austin in a letter on Wednesday to raise “democracy and human rights concerns” in the context of the ongoing farmer protests and 2019 enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act and the abrogation of Article 370.
There is growing disquiet among several US lawmakers over the farmer protests and the government response to them.
Invoking the Biden administration’s recently released Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, which underscores the importance of “democracy (as) essential to meeting the challenges of our time”, the senator wrote, “We should seek to partner with India to address challenges from China to climate change, but in doing so we cannot let our democratic values fall away.”
Menendez also urged the defence secretary to raise US opposition to India’s planned purchase of the S-400 Russian missile defence systems, which, he wrote, “threatens future US-India defence cooperation and puts India at risk of sanctions” under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), a US law that aims to punish Russia for the 2016 election interference by, among other things, scaring away its defence industry clients with the threat of secondary sanctions.
India paid an initial amount of $800 million for five S-400s in 2019 and is expected to receive them by the end of the year.
CAATSA sanctions typically kick in when the buyer country accepts the delivery of the Russian equipment, as it happened in the case of Turkey.
Turkey accepted the delivery of its first S-400s in July 2019, and the US cut it out next week from the F-35 programme to develop what are said to be the world’s most advanced fighter jets. A fuller range of sanctions was imposed by the Trump administration in December 2020.
India hopes to get a waiver from CAATSA sanctions, but US officials have warned against presuming it and have also said that among other things the Russian missile defence systems could impede India’s inter-operability with American defence hardware and could imperil future arms transfers
