On Thursday, External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh will go where no other Indian foreign minister has gone before -- to the White House for a meeting with President George W Bush at the Oval Office.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will also be present during the meeting at 0905 EST [around 1940 IST]. Singh will meet Rice again later during an official working lunch at the State Department.
Erstwhile external affairs ministers, like Jaswant Singh, and even Lal Kishenchand Advani, when he was the deputy prime minister, were taken to the White House by Rice, who was then the National Security Advisor. The president would then drop in and invite the Indian leaders to the Oval Office for a quick chat and a photo-op handshake.
But this time around, this unprecedented gesture apparently is a deliberate effort to reassure New Delhi that the US decision to provide F-16 fighter aircraft to Pakistan is in no way a slight to India and that Washington has a deep and broad strategic cooperation with India in store that goes even beyond the much-touted Next Steps in Strategic Partnership.
Administration sources told rediff.com that Rice herself had told the president and briefed him that such a meeting with Singh, which would be at most all of 10 minutes, would go a long way in removing any doubts among skeptics that the US had 'de-hyphenated' the US relationship with India and Pakistan.
The gesture is also to reiterate the US administration's position that it intends to 'help India become a world power'.
The sources said the President would also inform Singh that he was looking forward to the visit during summer [sometime in July] by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and that he himself was committed to visiting India in the winter, either late this year on in early 2006.
