US Secretary John Kerry to visit India on July 31 to push strategic ties

US Secretary of State John Kerry will represent the United States in an annual session of Strategic Dialogue with India scheduled for July 31, followed by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in Delhi, in early August.

The most senior US officials who will visit India for talks with the new government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi since his May election, seek to revitalise a relationship the US sees as a crucial counterbalance in Asia to an increasingly assertive China.

In testimony for a hearing of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Nisha Biswal, the US assistant secretary of state for South Asia, noted that President Barack Obama had said the US-India relationship would be "one of the defining partnerships of the 21st century."

She also said Modi had told US Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns in India last week that the world would benefit from closer US-India ties.Modi is expected to visit the United States in September.

"Across the board ... we have an opportunity here to engage more robustly with in India in how the Asian landscape unfolds and we look forward to engaging with the new government in that agenda," she said.

Biswal referred to planned joint military exercises involving India, the US and Japan, a country with a growing strategic rivalry with China in East Asia.

"A rising India is in some ways going to be an ameliorating influence on China, in China's own growth and China's own behavior in the region," she added.

Amy Searight, the US deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and Southeast Asia, said there was "a real strategic convergence" as India looked east in Asia and the US pursued its "rebalance" to the continent.

"We both are looking to the challenges in East Asia today, of which a rising China is certainly a major part," she said. 

Referring to India's growing relationships with other Asian countries, including Vietnem - a country which has been playing out a bitter territorial rivalry with Beijing in the South China Sea - Searight said, "We want to capitalise on that...we want to support that activity."