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We can become partners even in unexplored areas: Rocca

By Our Special Correspondent

The U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, Christina B. Rocca, with the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, at her residence in New Delhi on Tuesday. — Photo: Rajeev Bhatt

NEW DELHI MAY 14. The United States Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, Christina B. Rocca, said today she visualised the U.S. and India becoming as partners even in as yet unexplored areas to their mutual benefit.

Addressing the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Ms. Rocca said that transformation and consolidation of Indo-U.S. ties was top on the agenda of the Bush administration — it wanted to engage India on a whole range of issues that ranged from counter-terrorism, national defence, global climate change, international commerce to preventing HIV/AIDS.

Ms. Rocca dwelt at length on the growing military-to-military cooperation between the two countries and said that the partnership had crossed some impressive milestones. The ties had moved from ``discussion stage to active cooperation''.

``Not far from Agra, Indian paratroopers and American Special Operations Forces are participating in their largest-ever joint Army and air exercises since India's independence,'' she said. The specific goal of the current exercise was to conduct joint parachute training and mutual familiarisation with small arms.

``But the larger, long-term goal is much more ambitious and is based on strategic, diplomatic and political cooperation as well as sound economic ties. Military-to-military cooperation, for long a subject of discussion between us, is now producing tangible progress toward this objective,'' she said adding that functional working groups for the Army, the Navy and the Air Forces had discussed technological and research and development cooperation, sales, and licensing issues and peacekeeping cooperation.

A major highlight of the defence supply relationship between the U.S. and India, she said, was involvement of the private sector as well as the Government. The armed forces of the two countries were engaged in determining areas of mutual interest in basic research for military purposes and identification of areas for joint work in future defence systems development.

Reiterating that non-proliferation remained an important item on the bilateral agenda, Ms. Rocca said ``We are confident that the Indian Government shares our concerns about preventing the spread of sensitive technologies since the diffusion of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and missiles pose a serious threat to the security of both our countries.'' Further, India and the U.S. were also working together to stimulate bilateral high technology trade, besides having agreed to the resumption of three nuclear safety related projects and expansion of civilian space cooperation in areas of weather, migration and communications. Ms. Rocca, who, at the outset, condemned today's militant attack in Jammu said the U.S. and India had built a relationship in the war against terrorism. South Asia was a key front in the global war on terrorism and India had been a vital ally in the campaign to destroy the Al-Qaeda. She said U.S.-India counter-terrorism cooperation was rapidly maturing and the two countries were working towards protecting the two societies from threats of cyber attack. The Joint Working Group would be meeting in July to proceed further.

She referred to the visits by top-level functionaries for economic dialogues and said this would help the two countries to realise the enormous potential of ``our economic relationship''.

The U.S. Ambassador, Robert Blackwill, was present. Earlier, on the CII's behalf, Subodh Bhargava, welcomed Ms. Rocca and said there was vast scope for economic cooperation between the two countries.

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