US director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard arrived in Delhi on Sunday, marking the first high-level visit from the new Donald Trump administration, and attended a security conference chaired by national security adviser Ajit Doval.
Sources said the focus of the conference was on intelligence-sharing to tackle terrorism and transnational and financial crimes, and on cyber security and the Ukraine war.
Intelligence chiefs from Australia, New Zealand and Japan attended the conference, a home ministry official said.
Gabbard had announced her visit to India — part of a multi-nation trip to the Indo-Pacific region – last week.
“I am #WheelsUp on a multi-nation trip to the Indo-Pacific, a region I know very well having grown up as a child of the Pacific. I’ll be going to Japan, Thailand, and India, with a brief stop in France enroute back to DC,” she had said in a post on X.
Sunday’s conference, hosted by India’s national security council secretariat, comes a day ahead of the Raisina Dialogue, the country’s flagship conference on geopolitics and geo-economics.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate the Dialogue, to be held from March 17 to 19.
“The 10th Raisina Dialogue will witness participation of representatives from about 125 countries including ministers, former heads of State and heads of Government, military commanders, captains of industry, technology leaders, academics, journalists, scholars on strategic affairs, experts from leading think tanks…,” an external affairs ministry statement said.
New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, Gabbard and the foreign ministers of 20 countries — including Ukrainian foreign minister Andrii Sybiha — will be among those attending the conclave, a PTI report said.
In a first, a delegation from Taiwan, including a senior security official, will participate in the deliberations, the agency said citing “people familiar with the matter”.
It said that this reflected the growing cooperation between the two countries in the past few years.
The theme of this edition of the Dialogue is “Kalachakra: People, Peace and Planet”, PTI added.
