US-India Dysfunctional relationship will be mended on Clinton's visit for mutual benefit, forget about Kashmir, CTBT, NNPT or any other alphabet-soup acronyms.--JPR
'Clinton's trip to India has no conditions'
Free Press Journal
February 12, 2000
WASHINGTON: US President Bill Clinton's forthcoming visit to India has
"absolutely no conditions" attached to it and would focus on the new
Indo-American relationship without any links to matters, such as nuclear
proliferation, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty or Kashmir, reports PTI.
"There are absolutely no conditions" attached to President Clinton's visit to
India, foreign secretary Lalit Mansingh told reporters here on Thursday after an
intensive two-day talks with US officials involved in setting the presidential
agenda for the trip and key Senators and Congressmen.
On the current debate on whether Clinton should visit Pakistan or not, he said,
this is a sovereign decision to be taken by the American side but as a friend,
India has told the US that there will be a public reaction at home if Clinton
decides to go to Pakistan as well.
"As friends, we thought we should bring to their notice that there will be a public
reaction (in India if Clinton decides to go to Pakistan), and this has been
conveyed to them," Mansingh, who is here to lay the ground for Clinton's visit
to India in March, said. The focus of the visit, said Mansingh, will be on the new
post-cold war relationship, the new friendship, partnership being forged between
the world's most powerful democracy and the world's largest democracy. This
new partnership and matters of mutual interest would cover, among other things,
political, economic relationships, cooperation in science and technology, and
energy cooperation. "We are not looking for any favours," he said.
One of the decisions taken at these meetings was that, as a follow up to the
decision taken by secretary of state Madeleine Albright and Foreign Minister
Jaswant Singh, there will be a two-day conference in June in Poland on
promoting democratic values the world over. India will be represented at the
meeting by Singh. Indian ambassador to the US Naresh Chandra, who has met
other ambassadors in Washington, said 55 countries have so far accepted the
invitation to attend the meet.
A statement would be issued at the end of the conference and an announcement
made on where they would meet next. Asked about Albright's comments earlier
this week that Clinton's visit does not mean all Indo-US problems are solved and
that India still has to deal with nuclear nonproliferation and Kashmir, Mansingh
said "this is a meeting of democracies. |
