Author: K.P. Nayar
Publication: The Telegraph
Date: May 11, 2003
URL: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1030511/asp/frontpage/story_1958310.asp
President George W. Bush has sent
a powerful message which will galvanise his entire administration, American
business and even the US military into new vistas of Indo-US cooperation.
By meeting national security adviser
Brajesh Mishra in the White House Oval Office for 15 to 20 minutes during
his just-concluded two-day visit to Washington, Bush has communicated to
doubting Thomases here that nothing will stand in the way of strong Indo-US
relations: not New Delhi's unwillingness to join the coalition against
Iraq, not the American corporate community's complaints about the pace
of economic reforms in India, not even the severe pressure that India constantly
puts on America's close ally, General Pervez Musharraf.
Mishra's meeting with the President
began with the national security adviser conveying Prime Minister Atal
Bihari Vajpayee's greetings to Bush and renewing the invitation for a presidential
visit to India.
Bush, in turn, praised Vajpayee
for his initiative to resume talks with Pakistan and said his administration
would do anything possible to support the move. Neither the Indians nor
the Americans are willing to go into too much detail about the Oval Office
dialogue citing diplomatic privilege.
But sources said it was not a monologue.
Mishra is famous for his precise articulation and clarity. And as Bush
told deputy Prime Minister .K. Advani last year, he admires that in his
interlocutors.
But as important as the content
of the talks between Mishra and Bush are the circumstances in which their
meeting took place.
This has possibly been the busiest
week for Bush since the war began in Iraq. On the day he met Mishra, there
was a long line-up of leaders scheduled to meet the President at the White
House.
Among them were the Prime Minister
of Denmark, the emir of Qatar and the foreign ministers of Bulgaria, Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, whose accession to Nato
was ratified by the Senate on Thursday.
This was also the week when Bush
met Singapore's Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong and signed a Free Trade Agreement
with the island state. Other leaders who were in Washington this week were
Spain's Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and El Salvador's Vice-President
Carlos Schmidt.
Shortly before the President met
Mishra, six Indian Americans were in the White House as part of an Asian
American delegation. Bush told one of them, Narayanan Keshavan, executive
director of the Indian American Forum for Political Education, that "India
is important for all of us". He said of his plans to visit India that "it
has to fall into place".
What is significant about the White
House meetings this week is that every foreign visitor who met Bush was
an ally of the US in the war against Saddam Hussein.
Mishra was the sole exception -
from a country that did not join the "coalition of the willing" on Iraq.
It is a distinction which will be noted and positively reflected in the
coming months in America's dealings with India.
Bush underlined the importance his
administration attached to India by insisting that he did not want to "drop
in" on Mishra's meeting with his US counterpart, Condoleezza Rice. Dropping
in on such meetings is a traditional White House gesture of indicating
the President's direct interest in relations with a particular country.
But in Mishra's case, Bush insisted
that it was not to be a "drop in" but a regular meeting in the Oval Office.
Mishra was escorted into the Oval Office by Rice.
The Indian official was very modest
about the White House gesture. He told Indian correspondents here that
"this is not about me. It shows the importance the Bush administration
attaches to Indo-US relations".
Addressing a press conference just
before his departure for Paris and London, Mishra said there were absolutely
no differences within the Indian leadership on the Prime Minister's initiative
on Pakistan.
He said an opportunity for better
relations between the two South Asian neighbours "must not be wasted" by
acting in haste. It was necessary to proceed stage by stage.
Kashmir, he pointed out, was not
the only problem between New Delhi and Islamabad. There was, for instance,
Siachen, Sir Creek and a host of others, which can only be tackled by a
dialogue "sustained over a period".
