“In this context, they (the two leaders) directed their officials to identify specific new areas of collaboration at the next meeting of US-India Counterterrorism Joint Working Group”, said a joint statement issued after the talks.
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On his part, Obama said that it was natural for India and the USA, two biggest democracies, to “deepen and broaden” partnership. Although this has become an tradition for Indian prime ministers, he was once banned from the United States over massacres of Muslims.
PM Modi arrived here on Monday from Switzerland on his second bilateral visit to the U.S. after his trip in September, 2014. Obama and Modi also welcomed the announcement by the Nuclear Power Corporation of India (NPCIL) and Westinghouse that engineering and site design work will begin immediately and the two sides will work toward finalising the contractual arrangements by June 2017, the White House said.
Ahead of the trip, Indian Foreign Secretary Subrahmanyam Jaishankar told reporters Obama had invited Modi as one of the leaders with whom “he had a close and productive working relationship”. “We discussed how we can as quickly as possible bring the Paris agreement into force”.
“We agreed to join as soon as possible and that is what is reflected in the Joint Statement as well”, said the sources indicating that India had not fixed a deadline to sign.
The two leaders also “resolved that the United States and India should look to each other as priority partners in the Asia-Pacific and the Indian Ocean region”, the joint statement.
No country should conduct or knowingly support activity meant to prevent national computer security incident response teams from responding to cyber incidents, or use its own teams to enable online activity that is meant to do harm, the statement said.
Barack Obama and Narendra Modi vowed cooperation between the United States and India on nuclear power and climate change during a meeting at the White House Tuesday.
The agreement, forged previous year, will take effect when at least 55 countries representing 55 percent of global emissions ratify it.
“[Modi] also understands that while India needs to keep growing and still needs to bring electricity to a huge slot of the population, it can’t afford to do so using coal-powered plants”, Hajari says.
It said the United States reaffirmed its commitment to join the agreement as soon as possible this year.
During her address at ceremony of Repatriation of Cultural Property, US Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch said: “Today (Monday) we begin the process of returning more than 200 stolen cultural objects back to India”.
Later at a gala in his honour, Modi lauded the contributions of the Indian diaspora in the USA and said a partnership between the American capital and innovation, with Indian human resources and entrepreneurship can prove a powerful combination.
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Modi, who rose to prominence as a leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, was denied a visa to visit the U.S. in 2005, three years after religious riots killed more than 1,000 Muslims in the western state of Gujarat, where he was then the top official.
