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Manohar Parrikar meets US defence secretary in Delhi

NEW DELHI: American aircraft and warships will soon be able to access Indian military bases and vice versa for refuelling, repair and other logistical purposes, in a move that will further tighten the India-US strategic clinch and help Washington in its ongoing "re-balance" of 60% of its naval forces to the Asia Pacific to counter an increasingly assertive China.Signalling a shift from the UPA regime's diffidence over such pacts, defence minister Manohar Parrikar and his US counterpart Ashton Carter on Tuesday announced that the two countries "have agreed in principle" to share military logistics, which will now lead to inking of the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement in a few months.Top Indian officials took pains to clarify that the "reciprocal" logistics pact was just meant to facilitate military cooperation and not aimed at forging any sort of a military alliance against China.Top Indian officials clarified that the logistics pact with US was to facilitate military cooperation, especially for the flurry of bilateral combat exercises and humanitarian aid operations in the region.India and the US will also further bolster maritime security cooperation, which will include stepping up the complexity of its combat exercises and talks on anti-submarine warfare, but there are no plans for joint naval patrols in the contentious South China Sea or elsewhere. "India has not changed its stand (on joint patrols)," defence minister Manohar Parrikar said.Parrikar and his US counterpart Ashton Carter stressed that Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) did not entail stationing of any US troops on Indian soil, even as officials added that India will not extend support in the event of any US military action against "friendly countries". "We can refuse access to our bases whenever we want," said an official.But it does overturn the policy of the previous UPA regime, which had steadfastly stonewalled the US push for the so-called "foundational agreements" on logistics, the Communication Interoperability and Security Memorandum Agreement (CISMOA) and the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement for Geo-Spatial Cooperation (BECA) for well over a decade.Then defence minister A K Antony, backed by the Left and others, had opposed the three foundational pacts on the grounds that they would "compromise" India's traditional strategic autonomy and give "basing rights" to the US military in the country. While the Modi government still has some reservations on CISMOA and BECA, it says India and the US are institutionalising through LEMOA what already happens "on a case-to-case basis", as earlier reported by TOI.Carter, who met PM Narendra Modi and NSA Ajit Doval later in the day, said LEMOA will make it "more routine and automatic" for the Indian and American forces to operate together. "We have agreed in principle that all the issues are resolved. The text will now be finalised," he said.Meanwhile, defence minister Manohar Parrikar said he had "expressed concern" to his US counterpart Ash Carter over the F-16 sale to Pakistan. Overall, Pakistan will now have 84-85 F-16s, which are primarily directed against India.