Obama to Students: India Has Biggest Stake in Pakistan's Success
By Stephen Kaufman
Staff Writer
Washington - President Obama told Indian college students that their country is taking "its rightful place" in the world, but urged India to work toward a peace settlement with neighboring Pakistan, saying Pakistan's stability is very much in India's interests as it continues its economic growth.
"I am absolutely convinced that the country that has the biggest stake in Pakistan's success is India," Obama said November 7 in an hour-long town hall meeting at St. Xavier's College in Mumbai.
"India is on the move," he said, and instability in South Asia is not in its interests "at a time when you're starting to succeed in incredible ways on the global economic stage."
The president said that although the Pakistani government's progress against violent extremists inside the country "is not as quick as we'd like," Islamabad now understands the potential threat and the Pakistani army is adapting in order to face the challenges of extremist groups.
Obama said he hopes trust will develop between India and Pakistan over time and that dialogue between the two will begin "perhaps on less controversial issues and building up to more controversial issues." Eventually, there needs to be "a recognition that India and Pakistan can live side by side in peace and that both countries can prosper," he said.
The United States is willing to be a friend and a partner in that process, but ultimately it will be up to the two countries to "arrive at their own understandings in terms of how the relationship evolves," he said.
Obama took several questions from young Indian men and women, who filled the forecourt of the Catholic college that was founded by German Jesuits in 1869.
The president said he had come to India because he believes that its partnership with the United States "has limitless potential to improve the lives of both Americans and Indians, just as it has the potential to be an anchor of security and prosperity and progress for Asia and for the world."
India has already risen to become a world power, and the president said its emergence is good for the United States and for the world. The relationship between the world's two largest democracies "will be indispensable in shaping the 21st century," he said.
But he told the students that their country's future "won't simply be determined by powerful CEOs and political leaders," but also "by you, and by young people like you across this country."
As India continues its economic expansion, Obama urged young people not to dismiss "healthy materialism" because companies and businesses play a large role in lifting people out of poverty.
"We should not underestimate how liberating economic growth can be for a country," he said. "It forms the basis for folks to get an education and to expand their horizons, and that's all for the good."
At the same time, he warned that an exclusive focus on material wealth "shows a poverty of ambition."
Many Americans themselves are debating the positives and negatives of globalization, and the president said that the United States can no longer meet the rest of the world "economically on our terms" as it did in recent decades.
With the rise of countries like China, India and Brazil, "there's real competition out there," but he expressed confidence that the United States can retain its competiveness.
The changing era requires the United States to be more insistent upon the need for free trade and an end to protectionism, he said.
In the past, "we didn't need, necessarily, reciprocity because our economy was so much larger," Obama said.
Today, it is "not unfair" for the United States to insist that if its economy is open to everyone, "countries that trade with us have to change their practices to open up their markets to us," he said.
"If we can have those kinds of ... truthful, constructive conversations about how we produce win-win situations, then I think we'll be fine," the president said.
(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. )
No comments:
Post a Comment