US media hails Obama’s India visit

WASHINGTON - Mainstream US media has underlined the importance of President Barack Obama’s “passage to India”, saying it comes at an opportune moment for both countries.

“Indians are still feeling anxious and insufficiently loved. But the trip is a clear a sign of the importance that Obama places on the relationship. As he should,” said the New York Times in an editorial titled “Working With India.”

“The Clinton and Bush administrations talked that way, too. President George W. Bush was so eager to woo New Delhi that he gave away the store in a 2006 nuclear energy deal,” it said suggesting “It is up to Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to take this complex relationship to a more sustainable level.”

The San Francisco Chronicle editorially commenting on “President Obama’s passage to India” noted that “over the past several years, India has become one of the United States’ most important emerging economic relationships”.

The Chronicle suggested “this will be more of a ceremonial trip than a substantive one.”

“But even ceremonial trips can go a long way toward building relationships, and there are few relationships that will be more important to America’s long-term future than this one,” it said.

The Washington Post said: “It may look as if President Obama is fleeing the country for friendlier shores” after his Democratic party’s rout in Tuesday’s elections. “In fact, his tour of India, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea is important.”

India, it said, “ought to be a focal point of US policy since it’s a relationship that “is going to be indispensable to shaping the 21st century,” as the White House puts it.

“Yet so far this administration’s partnership with New Delhi has been less warm and productive than that of the Bush administration,” the Post said.

It advised Obama to “offer Prime Minister Manmohan Singh the assurance that the United States is committed to maintaining stability in the region - beginning with Afghanistan - and that India will have US support in checking overreaching by China.

(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)