After walking out of a China-centric free trade pact, India is embracing the chance to become a founding member of another grouping — this one led by the U.S.
New Delhi's move to solidify its alliance with Washington comes amid news that the U.S. overtook China to become India's largest trade partner in the fiscal year ending March 2022.
India's External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar later affirmed India's commitment to IPEF. At a conference in India with Southeast Asian nations last week, he said India was building infrastructure to forge closer links to Southeast Asia through Myanmar and Bangladesh which would dovetail with the new framework.
Countries in the [Indo-Pacific] region can overcome geography and rewrite near history if they get policies and economics right."Countries in the [Indo-Pacific] region can overcome geography and rewrite near history if they get policies and economics right," he noted. "A major flaw of RCEP was the inclusion of China," former chief economic advisor to the Indian government Arvind Virmani told CNBC. "China agrees to everything on paper, but has no compunctions about evading rules in practice. IPEF is very attractive to India because it includes east & southeast Asian countries but excludes China," he said.