McCain will visit India next week.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Arizona Senator John McCain has urged the US and Indian governments to commit to each other for the long-term, saying that a successful relationship is only possible if both countries’ governments are willing to work together to sustain and nourish it.
McCain’s speech on the floor of the US Senate on Thursday comes as he prepares to travel to India next week, for his first visit to the subcontinent since the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Parliamentary takeover of the BJP.
In his address, McCain said that he is “excited” to be visiting New Delhi again, saying he is “hopeful about what the Prime Minister’s election could mean for the revitalization of India’s economy and its rising power, and for the renewal of the U.S.-India strategic partnership.”
McCain said that the US and India share not just common interests, but common values, and it is therefore crucial that their relationship be restored to what it was at its peak. Freely admitting that things between the two nations have not been the best of late, McCain outlined three key areas that, if improved upon, will lead to almost automatic results.
“First, to shape the development of South Asia as a region of sovereign, democratic states that contribute to one another’s security and prosperity; second, to create a preponderance of power in the Asia-Pacific region that favors free societies, free markets, free trade, and free commons; and finally, to strengthen a Liberal international order and an open global economy that safeguard human dignity and foster peaceful development,” said McCain.
McCain also voiced his anticipation in seeing Modi succeed at leading India into a bright new future, saying that the US “has a stake in India’s success.” McCain offered his own advice to India’s leaders, saying that if India should work to solve its problems with “political gridlock, a flagging economy, [and] financial difficulties,” but that it is not his place to “tell India how to realize its full potential.”
The Arizona statesman, who lost to President Barack Obama in his 2008 White House bid, also touched on the Middle East, saying that a fortified US-India relationship would be critical to stabilizing the region, which has become a hotbed for religious violence yet again in the last few weeks.
“It is this simple,” said McCain. “If the 21st century is defined more by peace than war, more by prosperity than misery, and more by freedom than tyranny, I believe future historians will look back and point to the fact that a strategic partnership was consummated between the world’s two preeminent democratic powers, India and the United States.”
In his remarks, McCain also touched on the need to modernize India’s military, said that the US is here to help India rather than hurt it in spite of waves of regulatory actions taken by US agencies, and implied that bilateral trade is perhaps the only way India can really see the huge economic results it wants.
1 Comment
It will be only possible when you stop strip seaching diplomats.