At G20 Meet, US Looks To Encourage Ally India's Global Rise: Experts

Despite its differences with the United States, India still offers a strong partner at a time that China is wooing developing countries.

For two and a half decades, it has been a top and consistent goal for the United States across very different presidencies -- encouraging the rise of India. As New Delhi takes the global stage by leading the Group of 20 summit, President Joe Biden will be there as a cheerleader, even as US policymakers come to accept that India's interests will at times be at odds with Washington's.

The gathering comes the same year that India topped China as the most populous nation and surpassed its former colonizer Britain as the fifth-largest economy, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi being feted on visits to Washington, Paris and elsewhere.

"I think in some ways, Prime Minister Modi has wanted to make it India's coming-out party to the world -- as a major power, with its own independent voice, whose time has come," Tanvi Madan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said of this weekend's G20 summit.