US President Bill Clinton, his daughter Chelsea and mother-in-law Dorothy Rodham on their arrival at Palam Air Force station in the Capital on Sunday. Also seen in the picture is External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh. Photo: AP
US PRESIDENT Bill Clinton arrived to a warm welcome here tonight.
Prior to the landing of Air Force One at the Palam technical area, Mr Clinton told journalists accompanying him that he was glad to have arrived in New Delhi at dinner time. "I love Indian food," he remarked.
Mr Clinton accompanied by daughter Chelsea and mother-in-law Dorothy Rodham, was received by External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh, his deputy Ajit Kumar Panja, Foreign Secretary Lalit Mansingh and Indian ambassador to the US, Naresh Chandra. Mr Panja offered Mr Clinton a bouquet.
While Mr Clinton's visit is focused on India, where he will be spending five days, he is going over to Bangladesh tomorrow on a day-long trip. He will make a four-hour stopover in Pakistan on his journey back home on March 25.
In a formal sense, President Clinton's State visit to India begins only on the morning of March 21, when he is accorded a ceremonial reception in the forecourt of Rashtrapati Bhavan. It will be followed by a hectic schedule, including one-on-one talks with Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and a call on President K.R. Narayanan who will host a banquet in his honour. The next day, he will address Parliament.
This will be the first US presidential visit to India in 22 years. While three US Presidents and three Vice-Presidents had visited India earlier (between 1959 and 1984) five Indian Prime Ministers and one President have so far visited the US (between 1949 and 1994). Among them Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi visited the US thrice and Rajiv Gandhi twice.
Implying the overriding importance of the Indian leg of the visit, the US has described the Clinton trip as the turning of a new leaf in Indo-US relations. India, on its part, views it as the harbinger of "a qualitatively new" relationship between the two democracies which had been "estranged" for decades throughout the tension-filled Cold War.
President Clinton had been endeavouring to visit India since 1997 but frequent political changes in this country kept intervening. Relations nose-dived after India's May 1998 nuclear tests. Washington then led the international community in condemning India's overt nuclearisation, demanded a rollback of its nuclear weapons programme and imposed unilateral economic, technological and entity sanctions as a punitive measure. It followed these steps up by terminating all forms of defence cooperation.
Less than two years later, during which an unprecedented ten-round Jaswant Singh-Strobe Talbott talks on nuclear-related issues followed, the two countries are seeking to build up a relationship which should be wider, closer and deeper than relations of the last fifty years.
A joint statement titled "Vision of Relations," will be signed by Prime Minister Vajpayee and President Clinton on March 21. There will also be an agreement for setting up a high-level Science and Technology Forum. A third agreement, to be signed in Agra on March 22, envisages cooperation on energy and the environment.
President Clinton will also visit Agra (March 22), Jaipur (March 22-23), Hyderabad (March 24) and Mumbai (March 24-25) before he leaves India to go home on the morning of March 25, after a brief halt in Pakistan.
