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The Rediff Special/The President's speech

'These alarmist descriptions only encourage those who want to indulge in terrorism'

President K R Narayanan's speech at the banquet for US President Bill Clinton last fortnight still provokes controversy. What did the Rashtrapati say?

Your excellency, Mr William Jefferson Clinton, President of the United States of America; excellencies and distinguished guests. It is with great pleasure, Mr President, that I welcome you and the distinguished members of your delegation, the honourable representatives of the US Congress and high officials of the US government on behalf of the government and the people of India. We are aware that ever since your inauguration as President you have wanted to visit India. As a harbinger of your intention, the First Lady of the United States, Ms Hillary Rodham Clinton, made a visit to India in March 1995. We have pleasant memories of that visit and I should like to say that we miss her alongside you on this occasion.

India and the United States have been linked to each other by ideas, ideals and by enlightened interests. These go far beyond and deeper than the allurements of economics and trade and the entanglement of any military alliance. For most Indians, the United States of America resonates with the great names and the high ideas of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, and the philosophy and thoughts of outstanding American thinkers and writers like Emerson, Thoreau, Walt Whitman who influenced great Indians like Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru and, of course, Mahatma Gandhi. The influence of Gandhi on Martin Luther King Jr in the struggle for the equality of Blacks in America is well-known; so much so that when Mr King was shot, the whole world said that another Gandhiji has been shot.

Thus, Mr President, impulses greater than trade and commerce have linked our two countries and peoples. In 1961, at a time when we were facing particular issues, the then Prime Minister Nehru wrote to President John F Kennedy saying that even if the United States did not do anything, India would remain friendly to her.

Expatiating on this idea, Nehru wrote to the chief ministers of Indian states a little earlier and I quote: 'Many people imagine that our relations with the United States depend on the amount of financial aid that they can give us. This is a complete misapprehension. Whether the US gives us much or little or nothing at all, our relations with them will not be affected much, provided other factors are satisfactory. It is these other and political factors that are constantly coming into the way.'

A somewhat similar sentiment was expressed by Mahatma Gandhi much earlier, in 1936, when a group of Christian workers from the USA met him. He said, answering their questions, and I quote: 'When Americans ask me what service they could render, I tell them , if you dangle your millions before us, you will make beggars of us and demoralise us. But in one thing I don't mind being a beggar. You can ask your engineers and agricultural experts to place their services at our disposal. They must come to us, not as lords and masters, but as voluntary workers.'

Since Nehru and Gandhi gave expression to these sentiments, the relations between our two countries in economics and commerce and in the field of scientific exchanges have grown enormously, both in quality and quantity. Millions of tonnes of wheat have been shipped to India by USA and American agricultural experts have helped in igniting the Green Revolution which is one of the major achievements of India since Independence. The USA has emerged today as the number one partner of India in the realms of trade and investment and our economic co-operation promises spectacular prospects for the good of our two countries and the world.

I must mention here the role of over one million people of Indian origin resident in America who have made outstanding contributions to the country of their adoption and to the co-operation between the United States and India. But there is no gain saying that in the Cold War period our relations were bedeviled by military alignment and the ideological bloc politics and by the difficulty in that age of extremes on the part of the United States in appreciating India's policy of non-alignment and peaceful coexistence.

The mindset of the Cold War has perhaps not entirely disappeared. Vestiges of the Cold War strategies still return to haunt the world. We believe, Mr President, that in the post Cold War period, the non-aligned concept of a pluralist world order is more relevant than the politics of military blocs and alignments. At this juncture, I recall the words of Jawaharlal Nehru who, on assuming office in 1946, said, and I quote: 'We send our greetings to the people of the United States of America to whom destiny has given a major role in international affairs. We trust this tremendous responsibility will be utilised for the furtherance of peace and human freedom everywhere.'

Prime Minister Nehru had enjoyed a warm equation with President Eisenhower and years later with President John F Kennedy. Of the latter, Nehru said, 'Wealth and prosperity came to his country. To these, President Kennedy added a deeper human and moral outlook which embraced in its scope the peoples of the world.'

It is a measure of your own far-sightedness, Mr President, that you too, have thrown your great energy for the advancement of developing nations and the alleviation of poverty in the world. You have also striven to turn a major challenge in our bilateral relationship into an opportunity that both sides have grasped whole-heartedly. Mr President, one remarkable feature of the post-Cold War world is this emergence of a large number of developing nations in the political and economic arena of the world. And the other dominant fact is the emergence of the United States of America as the major economic, technological and military factor in the world.

The USA holds a tremendous responsibility for strengthening peace and stability in the world. For that purpose, the United Nations Organisation should be strengthened by the unstinting support of the United States of America and by reforming its major organs by giving the developing countries their due place in its central structure, reflecting the realities of the world today. We believe that among the developing nations, India has, in terms not only of its immense size and population, its economic and technological status and potentialities, but also in terms of its great services to the cause of the UN, every right to be represented on a reformed and expanded Security Council. Throughout its independent history, especially in the early years when the UN itself was under jeopardy, India had served the cause of the world body.

Mr President, we do recognise and welcome the fact that the world has been moving inevitably towards one world. From the earliest times, India has had intimations of an emerging one world of humanity as a single family. But for us, globalisation does not mean the end of history and geography and of the lively and exciting diversities of the world. As an African statesman has observed to us, the fact that the world is a global village does not mean that it will have only one village headman. In this age of democracy, it will be headed by a panchayat. For us, the United Nations is the global panchayat, and that is why we wanted to be democratised and sustained.

Globalisation means that global societies should be sustained by each unit -- the nation states, groups, families and individuals who have their own inextinguishable identities and unique characteristics. Long ago, Mahatma Gandhi described his version of one world in the following manner, and I quote: 'The better mind of the world desires today not absolutely independent states, but a federation of friendly, interdependent states. I desire the ability to be totally independent without asserting that independence."

In such a globalised world society, there would be no place for hegemonistic controls or cutthroat competition. India, Mr President, is a country that has wrested its independence from one of the mightiest empires on earth by the method of non-violence. It is not a desire of this nation to solve such problems as we have with our neighbours by the use of force. With Pakistan, which was carved out of our body politic, it was our desire to have friendly cooperation in a hundred ways after Partition. But if India's integrity and independence is threatened, it becomes the duty to the one billion people who inhabit our vast land to defend them with all the resources and strength at its disposal. We are open to a dialogue and a peaceful settlement of differences. But should they have the divine right of aggression and of indiscriminate and well-organised terrorism across the international borders or the agreed Line of Control sanctified by solemn treaties and commitments?

It has been suggested that the Indian subcontinent is the most dangerous place in the world today and Kashmir is a nuclear flashpoint. These alarmist descriptions will only encourage those who want to break the peace and indulge in terrorism and violence. The danger is not from us who have declared solemnly that we will not be the first to use nuclear weapons, but rather it is from those who refuse to make any such commitment. We are publicly committed to the abolition of nuclear weapons together with other nuclear powers who possess them in awesome stock piles capable of destroying the world many times over. India does not threaten any other country and will not engage in an arms race, but India will maintain a minimum credible nuclear deterrent -- no more, no less -- for her own security.

We continue to be anxious to work with the USA to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction and to promote a goal of a world free of weapons of mass destruction. On this historic, auspicious occasion of your visit to India, Mr President, let us appear to the world to take steps, concrete and substantive, towards nuclear disarmament along with non proliferation, so that we do not consolidate the existing inequalities and sanctify the possession of nuclear weapons in the armouries of the nations.

Mr President, your visit provides us an opportunity to lay the foundation of a new, dynamic and multi-faceted partnership between our great democratic nations. Our people now expect us to advance our relationship based on a shared commitment to peace and democracy reinforced by a growing mutuality of interest in political and technological fields and by an increasing convergence of a world view. This will require us to remain engaged in frank dialogue on the lines described by Henry David Thoreau. He said, 'It takes two to speak the truth -- one to speak, and another to hear.'

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