Clinton pushes security, nuclear deals in India

US: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pushed for nuclear deals and deeper security cooperation with India on Tuesday as she visited the key US ally in the shadow of triple bomb blasts in Mumbai.

Clinton is on a three-day trip to India, lobbying for US commercial interests while seeking to balance the delicate relationships Washington maintains with violence-wracked South Asian countries.

She said she was “encouraged” by India and Pakistan’s decision to restart their stop-start peace process, but she also heard Indian worries that a planned US troop drawdown in Afghanistan could lead to instability.

The top diplomat stressed that the US-India relationship, which President Barack Obama described as the “defining partnership of the 21st century”, had made great progress in recent years, but was yet to fulfil its potential.

She singled out civil nuclear energy as an area where the countries “can and must do more” amid frustrations that private US nuclear energy firms are losing out in India to their state-owned French and Russian competitors.

Former president George W. Bush concluded a landmark energy pact with India in 2008 that lifted an embargo on selling atomic technology to New Delhi imposed after the country’s first nuclear test in 1974.

AFP