Washington: The US has said a rising India is going to be an ameliorating influence on China as there will be areas of both collaboration and competition between the two Asian giants to work on.
"A rising India is in some ways going to be an ameliorating influence on China and China's own growth and in China's own behaviour in the region," Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, Nisha Desai Biswal said.
"There are going to be areas between India and China of economic collaboration and competition. We want to see an India that is able to thrive and rise and want to see all the economies of Asia to grow in a sustainable way that mitigates against the areas of conflict", she said.
"With respect to the India-China relationship that there will be areas where the United States and India will have great complementarity and collaboration. There will be areas where the US and China will be working together and there'll be areas where India and China will be working together," she said.
As India looks east and the US pursues its strategic rebalance, there's a real strategic convergence there as the two countries are looking to the challenges and opportunities in East Asia today, of which a rising China is certainly a major part, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for South and Southeast Asia Amy Searight said.
Noting that India has integrated itself into the ASEAN-led international regional architecture, Searight said, "we are beginning to cooperate much more with India on the kind of work that we do in the ASEAN-based organizations".
She said there were a lot of tensions in the maritime domain in the region right now and those are the areas where there are concerns on India's part.
"There are concerns on many of the ASEAN nations' part and those are the discussions we're having in those frameworks and having separately with India," she added.
Vikram Singh, vice president National Security and International Policy Center for American Progress, said Prime Minister Narendra Modi has shown that he wants to have good relations with China.
"But on the campaign trail he was also willing to actually publicly say China should not be an expansionist power but should be focusing on development which indicates that he is going to have a willingness to take on tough issues," Singh said.
Modi government is likely to pursue a multifaceted approach which involves both simultaneously improving trade and investment ties while also focusing on building up its own strategic and military capabilities to guard against the possibility of Chinese aggression along their disputed borders, Lisa Curtis of The Heritage Foundation said.
"The BJP election manifesto did not mention China specifically. However, it did commit to a massive infrastructure development program along the line of actual control which is the disputed between India and China in the states of Pradesh and Sikkim," she said.
"And Modi's call a few months ago for China to abandon its expansionist attitude shows that the new government is wary of Chinese territorial ambitions, epically in light of last April's border incident in which Chinese troops camped for three weeks several miles inside Indian territory in the Ladakh region of Kashmir," she said.
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