Clinton wants chill to thaw: Talbott

President Clinton, he said, has set as one of the objectives of his second term to have a qualitatively better relationship, “and he has not given up by any means.” “I have heard President Clinton on this subject more times than I can count before (the) May (nucleartests) and since then,” Talbott disclosed, providing a rare insight into the current thinking at the highest levels of the administration.

The hour-long interview took place in Talbott’s office on the State Department’s plush seventh floor, where amid classic paintings and fine carpets, the Deputy Secretary (who is acting Secretary of State these days because Albright is travelling) works out of a cluttered room redolent of his days as a journalist.

Several books on India, including India’s foreign minister Jaswant Singh’s Defending India, lay scattered on the coffee table. In one corner were oversized cutout maps of the troubled areas Talbott is currently dealing with: former Soviet Republics, Central Asia, Kosovo, and now, South Asia.

A man of formidable intellectual comportment, Talbott spoke at length, but very precisely, about the difficulties and complexities that have bedeviled Indo-US ties, choosing his words carefully, and often going off-the-record to freely elucidate about sensitive issues.He gave the impression that the US had come to understand India’s security paradigms, even if it did not agree with all the parameters.

But foremost, he indicated clearly that the momentum for normalising ties and improving the atmospherics was coming from President Clinton himself.Asked what evoked the President’s interest in India, Talbott, who was a fellow Rhodes scholar with Clinton in the sixties, surmised that it was great deal of British diplomatic history he (Clinton) read at Oxford, some of it dealing with India. They also had a couple of voluble classmates from India, he added with a chuckle.

More recently, Talbott said, the President has remarked at least half a dozen times about India’s large middle class and its technological prowess.“I remember him saying it was a shame that we have to focus on this (nuclear) program, when we ought to be focused on the Y2K problem, because he is aware there is a great deal of Indian expertise and entrepreneurship in the software area,” he added.

Withoutgoing into the fine print of the dialogue currently underway between the two sides, Talbott said he and his Indian counterpart Jaswant Singh were “in one sense engaged in classic diplomacy practice of the art of possible.”

“It is based on a realistic hope that within the bounds of the possible we could have a qualitative improvement of relationship in the relatively near term. And to have this, we will have to get beyond sanctions,” he said.

Talbott declined to go into details or be more specific, saying it would not be healthy or helpful for the US and India to be trading positions or appearing to negotiate in public “because it will have a deleterious effect on our ability to have a quiet discussion and move forward.”

But he said Singh and he would be talking about the subject over the next couple of days. At no stage did he suggest that the easing or lifting of sanctions would be unilateral.

The eighth rounds of talks begins Friday.

While not suggesting that the dialogue was anywhere nearclosure, Talbott did indicate that it had reached a crucial stage and the two sides were striving to reach common ground despite irreconcilable differences on the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), a pact that limits the world’s nuclear powers, and the benefits thereof, to five powers.

“That (disagreement on NPT) is going to impose some limits on this new relationship that we hope to have… but we still have a new relationship if we succeed in the very feasible terms and parameters that we have set for ourselves. I think it is doable in a time frame that will seem relevant and make all the hard work seem worthwhile,” Talbott said.