By Arun Kumar, IANS,
Washington : India and United States opened their strategic dialogue Wednesday with a call to harness the full potential of their multifarious relationship encompassing strategic, economic and defence issues, as also the struggle against terrorism.
“It’s a unique opportunity to bring together all the threads that constitute the extraordinary tapestry of our relationship,” Indian External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna said at the opening session of the third annual dialogue he is co-chairing with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Having settled the question whether India and the United States should forge a new cooperative relationship, “the question we ask is how to harness the full potential of that relationship”, he added.
Echoing Krishna, Clinton said: “The effectiveness of our cooperation depends on our abilities together to divert country interests into common action” on issues ranging from civil nuclear energy to more US investment in India to defending human rights to promoting women’s empowerment.
After that the delegations went into a plenary session for a wide ranging discussion surrounding five key themes: Strategic, Defence, Homeland Security, Counter-terrorism and Intelligence; Economic, Energy, Climate; Science & Technology, Innovation and Health; Higher Education and Empowerment; and Regional Strategies and linkages.
Krishna and Clinton had announced the strategic dialogue in July 2009 in Delhi. Clinton hosted the first edition in June 2010 in Washington. The second edition was in July 2011 in New Delhi.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at [email protected])