Obama Admin didn`t get off to good start with India: Blackwill

Lalit K Jha
Washington, Nov 4 (PTI) Obama Administration did not
get off to a very good start with India, a former US
Ambassador to India has said but asserted that during the
forthcoming presidential visit there will be enough aggregated
forward movement that can put this perception behind.
"I think it's widely shared around the national
security community in both countries that the Obama
administration did not get off to a very good start with
India," Robert Blackwill, former US Ambassador to India, told
reporters in a briefing on President Obama's India visit.
He said when President Obama took office he faced
global recession and two wars took his time up and he got
distracted. And the Kashmir issue, which President during his
campaign talked about a US diplomatic emissary to Kashmir, of
course, "is anathema to India".
"Dick (Richard) Holbrooke's efforts to include India
in his portfolio in that regard, and then US-China communique
in Beijing which seemed to say that China had a role in South
Asia and may be even in Kashmir, and then the IT services
dispute and so forth," Blackwill said.
"So I think, yes, it got off to a rather rocky start.
And again, to be fair on the Indian side, you have a
complicated coalition government - and a lot of other things
on the Indians' mind, too. I think that's why this visit is so
important.
"And hopefully, in all the dimensions that I
mentioned, there will be enough aggregated forward movement
that we can put that perception behind us and the two
governments can say to one another and to everybody else:
Well, we might have gotten off to a kind of slow start here,
but now watch our momentum. So that's what I think," Blackwill
said.
Blackwill is currently the Henry Kissinger Senior
Fellow for US Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign
Relations – a prestigious US-based think tank. MORE PTI