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Ambassador Blackwill arrives in New Delhi

P Jayaram in New Delhi

Robert Blackwill, the United States ambassador-designate to India and a "trusted friend" of President George W Bush, arrived in New Delhi early on Friday with wife Wera Hildebrand to take up his assignment.

US embassy officials said Blackwill, who succeeds Richard Celeste, will present his credentials to President K R Narayanan shortly. No date has, however, been fixed.

The presentation of credentials is expected to take place after Narayanan, recovering from a viral infection, assumes his normal duties, they said.

According to diplomatic observers in Delhi, Blackwill, a scholar and China specialist, will be a marked contrast to Celeste, the informal Ohio politician and a personal friend of former president Bill Clinton.

But they said that like Celeste, the new envoy would also have the ears of his president. They noted that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who administered to him the oath of office, had described him as a "trusted friend" of Bush and one of his principal foreign policy advisers during the presidential campaign.

Bush, who received Blackwill in the Oval office on the eve of his departure to take up his new assignment, had told the new envoy of his "strategic objective of transforming US India relations", describing it as a "pre-eminent priority of his administration".

He thanked Blackwill for agreeing to take up "this crucial assignment" and said the new ambassador was "exactly the man for the job".

The US president also told Blackwill that he "looked forward very much" to his proposed visit to India and asked him to convey the president's "warmest regards to Prime Minister [Atal Bihari] Vajpayee".

Blackwill, who also met members of the Congressional Caucus on India and Indians Americans this week, assured them that he would "carry out the president's core objectives of fundamentally redefining our relationship with India".

And, in an address to a large gathering of Indian Americans who were in Washington to attend the annual legislative conference of the Indian American Friendship Council and had been accorded a special White House briefing, he declared that he would leave no stone unturned in furthering the already blossoming ties between Washington and New Delhi.

"At the very top of the administration, there is determination to work with our Indian counterparts in transforming this relationship," he said.

Blackwill is a former professor of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and was chairperson of the executive programme for senior Chinese military officers.

Though the far right in Bush's Republican Party considers him "pro-China", Blackwill's recent book, America's Asian Alliances, calls for more concerted efforts by the US and its Asian allies -- Japan, Australia and South Korea -- to counter the rise of Chinese power.

"There is currently in the United States -- and to a lesser extent among the other allies -- a new interest in the growing role that India might play in Asia," he wrote.

"This is all to the good, as Washington and New Delhi have been at odds for too long. It was a mistake in the 1990s for the United States to have viewed India primarily through the prism of its confrontation with Pakistan."

He also noted Washington's recent fixation with India's nuclear programme "at the expense of a broader strategic approach".

And about Pakistan, the book says: "Pakistan today is on the edge of fulfilling the classic definition of a failed state. Its very survival as a nation is in question. If its state structures were to give away, WMD [weapons of mass destruction] proliferation and Islamic terrorism could become Pakistan's most important exports and the risk of war between Pakistan and India would rise."

"So the giddy talk in the US and elsewhere regarding India as a potential strategic partner should not weaken the allies' determination to do all they can to avoid a violent collapse of Pakistan."

Indo-Asian News Service

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