US happy over Swaraj\\\'s Bangladesh visit

The US is happy over Sushma Swaraj’s visit to Bangladesh last month, as it welcomes Delhi’s efforts to strengthen regional ties and in which Washington believes it has roles to play. India’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi invited all SAARC leaders to his swearing in ceremony and sent his foreign minister to Bangladesh in her first stand-alone visit to any country within a month of assuming the office, said Nisha Desai Biswal, Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs. Biswal said the US welcomed India’s new government’s efforts to strengthen SAARC. ‘We were pleased to see Indian Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj make her first official visit abroad to Bangladesh in late June.’ The US’s locus of strategic interests is in Asia and that ‘a strong US-India partnership will help us address shared challenges and seize shared opportunities’, Biswal said while testifying before the Senate committee on foreign relations on India-US ties on Wednesday. She said Barack Obama describes India-US partnership as one of the defining partnerships of the 21st century. The Washington’s point person for South Asia said Secretary of State John Kerry is planning to travel to New Delhi later this month to co-chair the US-India Strategic Dialogue with his new counterpart Sushma Swaraj. She said they expect that the strategic dialogue will kick off ‘a series of cabinet-and sub-cabinet-level visits throughout the late summer and fall, culminating in the visit of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Washington at the invitation of President Obama,’ according to bdnews24.com.