By IANS,
Washington : President Barack Obama Tuesday recalled the visit of India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru to the US in 1949 to suggest that “as we build our common future, we can draw strength from our shared past.”
“For it was exactly 60 years ago, in a ceremony not unlike this, that an American president welcomed to the White House the first prime minister of an independent India,” he said, rolling out the red carpet for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the first state visit of his presidency.
“And while the decades that followed were not without their challenges, the spirit of that first visit is with us today — the same sense of possibility, the same hope for the future,” he said.
“So as President (Harry S.) Truman said of Prime Minister Nehru, it is my privilege to welcome ‘the respected leader of a great nation of free people,” he said.
“And as Prime Minister Nehru said of the work before them, may our two great nations ‘find many ways of working together in friendly and fruitful cooperation to our mutual advantage, and for the good of humanity,'” Obama recalled.
“Mr. Prime Minister, Mrs. Kaur, in that spirit, I welcome you to the United States of America,” he said amid applause.