INDIA IS going into the first US Presidential visit after a gap of 22 years quietly confident that while serious differences over vital issues will persist between the two countries, the period of estrangement and sterility is over. It is now time to interact with each other intensively and extensively for mutual benefit.
There is a clear desire to focus on this principal attribute of the visit, which should not be seen through the prism of Pakistan. Stop looking at Indo-US relations through this prism, advised External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh today.
Yet, Pakistan intrudes into bilateral relations of India, emphasising that it is India that has to resolve differences with its neighbour." India's objection to President Clinton's visit to Pakistan was actually "a comment on the continuing reality," he added.
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There were growing indications that both the countries were deeply disturbed by what had happened in Pakistan and were increasingly aware of the impact on India.
Does President Clinton's visit to Pakistan confer legitimacy on Gen. Pervez Musharraf? Will it be an engagement between President Clinton and Gen. Musharraf? Possibly, the Clinton visit will be followed by other visits but I don't think that alters the reality," Mr Singh said.
Neither is there undue perturbation over President Clinton's latest statement that he would not accept "the nuclear status of the region and move on." "The US will continue to say that nuclear proliferation remains a big issue," the Minister said. "We understand this because this is an election year."
While the Federation of American Scientists' report on Pakistan's missile facilities attracted a great deal of attention in the US due to the proximity of the Clinton visit, Mr Singh said that since the 1980s India had known all along about Pakistan's missile programme just as the US military and the Central Intelligence Agency had. "The State Department is however yet to make up its mind (about it)."
Meanwhile, the continuity of the technology, entity and economic sanctions by the US against India with the Clinton visit approaching fast clearly hurts India.
Even as reports indicated today that Mr Clinton might ease the sanctions regime, waiving those which have restricted development assistance and US Agency for International Development programmes (USAID chief Brady Anderson will be accompanying the President), Mr Singh said, "We treat the sanctions as iniquitous and unjustified. Piecemeal dissolution of the sanctions won't do. We understand the domestic compulsions that the election year presents but the whole question of imposing sanctions is self-defeating."
"It is for the US to judge for itself on (the continuity or otherwise of) the sanctions," he added.