Pakistan PTI Sept. 11, 2002
Indo-U.S. ties no longer hostage to
Pakistan-centric approach: Sinha
By
T. V. Parasuram
WASHINGTON: External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha on Tuesday
said that Indo-U.S. 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.
