Prime Minister Narendra Modi will travel to Washington DC and New York in the last week of September, according to top Indian government sources quoted by The Indian Express. This will be his first visit to the United States since President Joe Biden assumed office in January this year. The likely dates being explored is September 22-27, the paper said.

With the situation in Afghanistan unfolding rapidly, Modi’s visit is significant. Besides meeting Biden, he is expected to have important meetings with the top echelons of the US administration.

This will be Modi’s first in-person meeting with Biden. The two have met virtually on at least three occasions — the Quad summit in March, the climate change summit in April, and the G-7 summit in June this year.

Modi was supposed to travel to the UK for the G-7 summit where he could have met Biden, but had to cancel the trip due to the second Covid-19 wave across India.

Modi last visited the US in September 2019, when then US President Donald Trump had addressed the Howdy Modi diaspora event in Houston, and the Prime Minister’s “abki baar Trump sarkar” (Trump administration will be back) line had not gone down well with the Democratic party’s establishment. Two years since, it will be an effort to reach out to the Democratic establishment, which has been quite vocal about the human rights situation in Jammu and Kashmir, the paper underlined. 

On the strategic side, the two sides will work on an ambitious agenda on the Indo-Pacific, with the Chinese challenge being one of the shared concerns. In this context, an in-person Quad leaders’ summit is being planned in Washington DC, around the same time as Modi’s visit.

In a bid to give shape to the Modi visit agenda, Indian Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla has met top Biden administration officials in Washington DC, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Deputy Secretary Wendy Sherman, and held substantive discussions with them on the strategic bilateral ties and regional and global issues like the current situation in Afghanistan.

This was the first high-level discussion between the officials of the two countries after the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan on August 31.

Modi is also likely to visit New York to attend the 76th session of the annual United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).