M A I N   N E W S

Blackwill quits, backs India on terrorism

New Delhi, April 21
The US Ambassador to India, Mr Robert Blackwill, who announced on Monday that he was quitting to return to teaching at Harvard, has called for his country’s support to India in the fight against terrorism.

“As I have said many times during my stay in India, the fight against international terrorism will not be won until terrorism against India ends permanently,” Mr Blackwill said in a statement.

“There can be no other legitimate stance by the United States of America, no compromise whatsoever on this elemental geopolitical and moral truth.

“The USA, India and all other civilised nations must have zero tolerance for terrorism. Otherwise, we’ll sink into a swamp of moral relativism and strategic myopia,” he said.

Mr Blackwill said: “I will return to Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government at the end of this summer to continue my academic career in the footsteps of two of my illustrious predecessors — John Kenneth Galbraith and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.”

The envoy, who has made a big impact in New Delhi since he took up the post less than two years ago for his passionate espousal of closer India-USA relations, gave no reason for his decision in his 1,100-word statement.

He only said his wife and he missed the family. “We miss our five children in the USA. We are attached to our home in Cambridge and our friends back home. Harvard beckons. Mother India has marked us deeply and only for the better — for all time”.

In May last year, the State Department in the USA had held an inquiry into complaints by embassy staffers about Blackwill’s “autocratic management style” of running the embassy.

Reports at that time said some State Department officials were unhappy with Blackwill, who was handpicked by the President of the USA, Mr George W. Bush, for the job, for going over their heads to access the White House.

He said he had already informed Mr Bush and other senior administration officials of his decision during a visit to Washington in January.

The envoy was full of praise for “Mother India,” a country he described as “magnificent” and a “rising great power of the 21st century”, and upbeat about the future of India-USA relations. “Our consistently troubled bilateral past is behind us,” he said. IANS