PM Modi’s Silicon Valley visit comes up in WikiLeaks email

WASHINGTON: The US had mulled having former President Bill Clinton co-host a clean-energy roundtable during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Silicon Valley

WASHINGTON: The US had mulled having former President Bill Clinton co-host a clean-energy roundtable during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Silicon Valley in 2015, where he met and wooed industry leaders such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla’s Elon Musk and Google’s Sundar Pichai, according to leaked emails released by Wikileaks on Monday.

HT Image

“Indians are looking for some other USG principal to participate with industry, academia and government,” Nisha Biswal, assistant secretary of state heading the South and Central Asia desk, wrote in an email to John Podesta, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama on climate change and clean energy who left his post earlier that year to head Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Commerce secretary Penny Pritzker was to represent the US, but she pulled out.

The authenticity of the email was not confirmed by the state department as a matter of policy but it was among Podesta’s hacked communications.

It did not reveal any major policy decisions or developments but was able to throw light on US preparations around Modi’s visit to Silicon Valley, which was to focus on digital economy and clean energy.

According to the mail, the US expected India to make some sort of announcement during Modi’s tour of the Tesla facility. But nothing happened eventually. India remains interested in the company’s solar-energy batteries.

Biswal was at the time trying to find “a Cabinet rank principal” to convene the clean energy round-table event that Modi was scheduled to attend at Stanford University, as sought by India.

“We will of course see if Secretary [John] Kerry or Secretary [Ernest] Moniz can go to Califorinia that weekend but things are complicated by the Xi (Chinese president Xi Jinping) visit and the UNGA schedule. Are there other options you would suggest we pursue? Another option would be to see if Governor Brown or perhaps President [Bill] Clinton would be interested in co-hosting/convening. Also, would you want to participate in the roundtable? Let me know if you have thoughts on this or want to discuss.”

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz co-hosted the event, eventually.