Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh will also meet U.S. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth in Malaysia on Friday, in an effort to calm down the tension between the two nations after the recent escalation between them over punitive U.S. trade tariffs. This will be a first official interaction between two Indian officials as the meeting will be held on the sidelines of the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting in Kuala Lumpur.
The officials say that talks will be aimed at regaining trust and broadening defence cooperation that saw months of tense relations. Some of the topics to be addressed are the Indian plan to acquire American military equipments, specifically the Indian navy will be equipped with six Boeing P-8I maritime surveillance planes and the Indian-U.S defence cooperation framework that is being developed to strengthen the strategic and operational relationships between India and the U.S.
The meeting is anticipated to bear positive results and set the stage to have a bilateral visit, an example of bilateral visit is when Secretary Hegseth visits New Delhi or Minister Rajnath Singh visits Washington. Both the officials, though, asked anonymity since they were not given the authority to brief the media. The Indian Defence ministry and the U.S embassy in New Delhi are yet to make official statements about the meeting.
Singh had planned to make the visit to Washington in August, but the visit was cancelled when relations were at their lowest in decades. The divide was widened when the U.S. President, Donald Trump increased tariffs on Indian imports by 50 percent in retaliation that India kept on purchasing Russian oil.
Today, as Indian refiners cut Russian oil supplies after new U.S. sanctions on Russian leaders as the largest exporters of crude oil, the two countries consider ways of reestablished contacts. In his Asia tour in South Korea earlier in this week, Trump was optimistic that he would create a trade agreement with India.
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