The US energy secretary has postponed a trip to India, officials said Thursday, as a row over a diplomat's arrest casts a cloud over once-growing cooperation between the countries.
Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz had been due to lead a delegation next week to India to discuss clean energy and climate change. An Energy Department official said that Moniz would not go as scheduled and that the two countries were in talks on finding a new date.
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that the United States still considered energy and climate change — which Secretary of State John Kerry made the focus of a trip to New Delhi last year — "a key element of our strategic partnership with India."
"In order to find a time to allow both sides to deliver on the important issues … we're looking for a mutually convenient time in the near future that will permit both sides to do that," Psaki said.
The cancelation was among the most concrete examples of US-India relations going into freefall since the December 12 arrest of Devyani Khobragade, a consular official in New York, on allegations of visa fraud and underpaying her domestic servant.
India voiced outrage that Khobragade was strip-searched in custody, treatment that US authorities say is standard but which is unthinkable in India toward an educated woman.
India has retaliated by dismantling extra security barricades that have been outside the US embassy since after the September 11, 2001 attacks and has barred non-diplomatic staff from using the embassy's sprawling sports and leisure complex.
The United States and India were estranged during the Cold War but relations have since steadily warmed, with the world's two largest democracies both opposed to Islamic extremism.
