‘India open to unprecedented co-op with US due to Chinese aggression'

India is willing to engage in unprecedented levels of cooperation with the US, mainly due to the Chinese aggression, but at the same time New Delhi is “fearful” both of “entrapment” and “abandonment” by Washington, former national security adviser lieutenant general (retd) HR McMaster has said.

- Lalit K Jha

Giving a firsthand account of his tenure during the Donald Trump administration as NSA, McMaster in his book At War With Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, which hit the bookstores on Tuesday, says he met his Indian counterpart Ajit K Doval a day before he was fired by Trump in 2018.

“The day before I was fired, I met for dinner with my Indian counterpart Ajit Doval at Quarters 13, Fort McNair, a quiet place at the intersection of the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers, south of the US Capitol.

“Doval is a character straight out of central casting. Betraying his background as the former director of his country’s Intelligence Bureau, he would lean into conversations, cock his head to the side as he spoke, and use hushed tones, even when discussing the most routine subjects,” McMaster writes.

McMaster in his book gives a detailed account of his trip to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India from April 14-17, 2017, during which he met then-foreign secretary S Jaishankar, Doval and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi.