US Vice President Joe Biden held talks with Indian leaders Tuesday as he sought to calm fears over the exit of American troops from Afghanistan and capitalise on growing investment opportunities.
Biden met his counterpart Hamid Ansari at the start of a round of talks that will include sessions with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, President Pranab Mukherjee and a top opposition figure.
The vice president, the most senior US official to visit India since President Barack Obama in 2010, has said the world’s two largest democracies share common goals on a range of regional security issues.
But there is widespread unease among Indian leaders over what will happen in Afghanistan once US troops have left in 2014, with many fearing that Pakistan has most to gain from the withdrawal.
India has spent more than $2bn of aid in Afghanistan since the Taliban were toppled in the 2001 US-led invasion.
Even though planned talks between the US and Taliban collapsed last month, the possible return to power of the Taliban alarms many in India.
In an interview ahead of his arrival, Biden said the Taliban had a part to play in the political process as long as they renounced violence.
Indian and US officials have pointed to Biden’s visit as a chance to heat up the investment climate and crank up the levels of bilateral trade, which are on course to reach around $100bn a year.
But in a sign of the frustration among American investors over the obstacles they face in doing business in India, a
Washington-based lobby wrote an open letter to Biden urging him to address what it called “India’s unfair trade and intellectual property practices.”
The issue of intellectual property has been a major bone of contention in trade ties for years, with the American pharmaceutical industry consistently accusing India’s huge generics industry of riding roughshod over patents.
