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Indo-US ties no longer hostage
to Pak-centric approach: Sinha

External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha on Tuesday said that Indo-US relations were no longer 'hostage or prisoner to the old Pakistan-centric approach'.

Sinha praised US Secretary of State Colin Powell's 'very positive statement' in which he assured India that Washington would continue to press Pakistan to stop cross-border infiltration into Jammu and Kashmir and not interfere in any way with the elections in the state.

"The desire to go beyond the Indo-Pakistan-centric approach was expressed by Powell during his visit to India and it has been like that since," Sinha told reporters after talks at the state department with Powell, at the White House with US President George Bush's National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and at the Pentagon with Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The interactions provided an opportunity to both countries for further broadening and deepening their understanding with regard to various bilateral and multilateral issues, Sinha said. "We are now looking forward to the meeting between the prime minister and President George Bush on September 12," he told mediapersons in Washington.

Later, addressing members of the Brookings Institutions, a leading Washington-based think-tank, Sinha described India and the US as the 'twin towers of democracy' and said the two countries are natural allies in the war against terrorism around the globe as well as in the campaign to spread democracy and its values.

This description was appreciated by the audience as particularly appropriate because he was speaking on the eve of the first anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, which destroyed the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York.

India, Sinha pointed out, has long been a victim of clandestine warfare and of state-sponsored cross-border terrorism carried out in the name of religion.

"Our aircraft have been hijacked, trains and buses have been bombed, market places, work places and centres of learning have been attacked, even women and children have not been spared. Posterity may well judge September 11 to be a watershed in the history of modern civilization. The dramatic events of that day brought home the fact that terror is a global menace, not constrained by geographical or national boundaries," he said.

"Democratic and open societies such as ours are particularly vulnerable to the threat of organised terrorism. What the terrorists seek to destroy are the values and principles that democracies cherish. India and the US, therefore, have a vital stake in defeating the forces of terror," Sinha said.

"We are yet to develop an effective response to the suicide assassin," He pointed out, adding, "The intersection of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism complicates our task further."

"We have had a measure of success in targeting terrorists and inducing their state sponsors to rein in their irresponsibility, but we have had rather limited success in changing permanently their ingrained pattern of behaviour," he said.

Welcoming Sinha to the institution, Brookings's head Strobe Talbott said the US has in recent years opened a new chapter in its relationship with the world's largest democracy - a relationship based on mutual trust, mutual cooperation and working together as two great democracies to address a whole array of bilateral, regional and global challenges.

Talbott was Deputy Secretary of State in the Clinton administration and had conducted several rounds of negotiations with Sinha's predecessor Jaswant Singh.

More reports on the PM's visit to the US

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