PM plays host to Clinton

By C. Raja Mohan

NEW DELHI, APRIL 7. Even as the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, assesses the highly-successful visit of his Foreign Minister to Washington, he was hosting tonight one American who has made Indo-U.S. rapprochement a possibility - Mr. William Jefferson Clinton.

Neither the Bush Administration which received Mr. Jaswant Singh with great warmth yesterday nor the Indian Government would like to give too much public credit to Mr. Clinton, former U.S. President who has returned here this week to reignite his romance with India.

Mr. Clinton is no longer the President of the U.S. and a man from his rival party now runs the White House. The business of diplomacy must, however, go on between the nations despite the change of governments and leaders.

Mr. Vajpayee, determined to woo the new Bush Administration, would not want to be seen as going overboard in entertaining Mr. Clinton, for long the bete noir of the Republican establishment which is now ruling the roost in Washington.

But for Mr. Vajpayee, Mr. Clinton was an extraordinary American interlocutor. He was a partner in dramatically recasting the Indo-U.S. relationship about which few in the two countries were willing to bet on until recently, at least till Mr. Clinton set foot in this country almost a year ago.

Mr. Clinton electrified India when he became the first American President to visit India in nearly 22 years last spring. Mr. Clinton admitted recently that his trip to India was one of the best visits abroad in his eight years at the White House. And Mr. Clinton was a very gracious host to the Indian Prime Minister six months later.

What a transformation the two leaders have wrought in such a short span of time? Barely three months after India's nuclear tests in May 1998, Mr. Vajpayee had declared that New Delhi and Washington were ``natural allies''. Angry with India's nuclear tests, the Americans scoffed at the idea; and the champions of non-alignment in India raised disapproving eyebrows.

But in the final months of his tenure last year, Mr. Clinton was beginning to endorse the notion of a natural alliance between the two democracies. Now it appears that the Bush Administration may be ready to transform the idea into a reality.

Although his contribution will not be acknowledged today, historians will record that it was Mr. Clinton's visit to India last year that buried forever the long-accumulated antagonism between the world's largest and most powerful democracies, and created the basis for a new relationship between the nations.

It is entirely in the fitness of things that Mr. Vajpayee spends time with Mr. Clinton who is here to raise international awareness of the need for a substantive reconstruction effort in the areas devastated by the earthquake in Gujarat.

The state dinner planned by Mr. Vajpayee for Mr. Clinton had to be cancelled because of the death of the former Deputy Prime Minister, Mr. Devi Lal. But Mr. Vajpayee had a long session tonight with Mr. Clinton.

No great discussion on immediate policy issues in Indo-U.S. ties was expected. But the two leaders had ideas to share on the future of Indo-U.S. relations, to which they can justifiably claim to have given a bold, new direction.

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