With quintessential diplomatic astuteness, the Congress party's master trouble-shooter for decades, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, shrugged off the irritants that loom large in US-India relations -- including the outsourcing controversy -- preceding the visit next month to India of President Barack Obama, saying all of these problems can be resolved through dialogue.
During an interaction that followed his remarks on the India-US partnership, when asked if the outsourcing issue and other hiccups in the relationship had been resolved ahead of Obama's 'landmark visit,' Mukherjee lectured, "In any growing relationship between countries and other partners, there will be issues which ought to be address through dialogue, through discussion, through negotiations."
He argued that such issues were only inevitable "because this is a growing relationship and there is a dynamism in the relationship, and therefore, it cannot be a situation where all issues will be resolved in one time."
Mukherjee said, "The essence of the relationship is to have the desire to dialogue and through the process of dialogue to resolve the outstanding issues."
"Therefore the issues of outsourcing, the issues of financial relationship and arrangements, all of these are being looked into at the appropriate forums --there are various appropriate forums to carry on this dialogue in regular structural manner between India and the United States of America."
The minister said, "All of these fora are activated and put into operation," in anticipation of Obama's visit, and predicted, the visit would "not only be important, outstanding visit, it will also as the President himself pointed out, it would be a defining moment in history and it cannot be categorised in one, two, three, four items."
Mukherjee said the overall message that Obama's visit would convey, "would be that the two large democracies -- one of the large, populous countries of the world and the largest functional democracy and another, one of the oldest democracies -- believing in pluralism, multi-racialism, multi-culture, they are coming together."
He said the essence of this message is that "in a democracy there should be diversity and we should not oppose diversity. We should celebrate diversities that strengthen. And, I do hope that President Obama's visit to India will convey to the world that message very clearly and distinctly."
