Modi goes to Washington as partner, but not yet full ally

New Delhi - This will be his 7th meeting with Obama since he became PM

Two years ago there were questions over whether Indian PM Narendra Modi could get a visa to enter the United States. Next week he visits Washington as one of President Barack Obama's closest international partners.
Obama invited Modi for one of the last big visits by a world leader before his term ends in January. Although the trip won't feature a lavish state dinner, the Indian leader will address both houses of Congress, considered a rare honour.
This will be their seventh meeting since Modi became PM in May 2014, an impressive tally for a US president and a leader who is not a formal ally, said Ashley Tellis at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
"The personal relationship between the president and the prime minister ... is really one of the unanticipated surprises of the past two years," said Tellis, an expert on India.  The developing relationship is seen as an Obama foreign policy success. US views India as an important part of its rebalance to Asia and as a counterweight to China. 
The two countries are finalising agreements that would make it possible for their militaries to cooperate more closely, and for US defence manufacturers to both sell and make high-tech weaponry in India.
A deal on logistics would govern issues such as how the two countries account for costs of military exercises. Another involves encrypted communications and geospatial data transfer.
A history of colonial rule followed by decades of non-alignment has, however, made New Delhi wary of an embrace by the more powerful United States, which has overtaken Russia as India's top arms supplier.
"It is neither a strategic partnership nor an alliance," said Nitin Gokhale, founder of defence portal Bharat Shakti. "It can be a long-term arrangement, but to call it a strategic partnership would be premature."
There are frustrations, too, on the US side.  The two countries reached a civil nuclear agreement in 2005, but it has yet to yield any contracts for US-based companies. Only now is Westinghouse, a unit of Japan's Toshiba, approaching the finish line on a deal to build six reactors in India.  
Modi is generally popular with US lawmakers, who extended his invitation to address Congress. But they criticise what they see as lingering unfriendliness to US firms and a stifling bureaucracy, and question New Delhi's record on human rights.  "The economic engagement between our two countries should increase and it should be more accessible for US companies," Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a telephone interview.
Obama and Modi are expected to discuss India's desire to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), a 48-member club of nuclear trading nations. There is lingering concern in Washington over Modi's handling of communal riots in 2002 that killed at least 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, in Gujarat.
Congress' Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission has scheduled a hearing on India for June 7, the day Modi arrives in Washington and the day before his address to the combined House of Representatives and Senate. He leaves the United States on June 8. 
 

• India