“India’s reforms might be slow and uneven, but it is the real thing”

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

Related Articles

Gold the most preferred investment

: One of the staunchest believers of the big strides India is poised to take in the global scheme of things, the US ambassador to India, Dr David Campbell Mulford has served several key positions earlier. This doctor of philosophy from Oxford University has been the chairman of the Credit Suisse First Boston, under-secretary and assistant secretary of the US Treasury for International Affairs. He has also been decorated with the Legion d’Honneur by the French President in 1990. A supporter of President Bush’s belief in India’s committment to secularism, and as a country that believes in democracy and religious freedom, Mulford claims he decided to come to India within an hour of being offered the Ambassador’s post in 2004. Excerpts from an interaction.

DAVID MULFORD: I would start by making three brief points and then take your questions. The first is: When I came here two or three quarter years ago, I immediately began to characterise the India-US relationship as a comprehensive relationship and those words have turned out in time as increasingly the case. By comprehensive relationship, I meant to distinguish between the bilateral government-to-government relationship that is the focus of so many people. The focus has been for so many years between the US and the up and down relationship on one hand and the full relationship on the other, the vast inter change and engagement of our private societies, our business economies, our technical people, our citizens in general. A sort of people-to-people movement which represents a huge historic engagement in my view, which increasingly will characterise our relationship in our coming years.

The cornerstone of that process over the past 18 months has been the civil nuclear agreement but that is not everything that indeed is the most important part of the relationship.

Now, a major initiative by the President of the US and which required a change in the US law to the atomic energy act which has not been changed for over 35 years and that process has culminated few days ago in the US Senate. This was achieved a few days after one of the most divisive elections in recent American history where Democrats and Republicans had not been able to agree on anything for months. They are deeply divided by social and cultural issues, by Iraq but India enjoys bi-partisan support.