SPEECHES / STATEMENTS 

PM's opening remarks at the Joint Press Conference at the White House

November 24, 2009, Washington DC

Mr. President, distinguished ladies and gentlemen of the media. I thank from the core of my heart President Obama for his very generous hospitality and for his very warm sentiments towards India and to me, in particular. I am honored to be here today in this great country at the invitation of His Excellency, the President. When India and the United States meet, it is a moment to celebrate the values of democracy, pluralism, liberty, and freedom. Today we have done that and much more. In our discussions today, we reaffirmed the importance of our relationship and decided on future steps to enhance our strategic partnership. We have agreed to further intensify our trade, investment, and economic cooperation in a way that creates jobs and prosperity in both our two countries and stimulates global economic recovery. We admire the leadership that President Obama has provided to stimulate and guide the G20 process that is now fully in place. We have decided to give a fresh impetus to collaboration in the fields of education, agriculture, and health. We will deepen our ongoing cooperation in frontier areas of science and technology, nuclear power, and space. This will open new opportunities for our universities and laboratories, and create human capital to meet the global needs of the future. We had a very constructive exchange of views on strategic issues. Our defense cooperation is progressing well. We agreed on the early and full implementation of our Civil Nuclear Cooperation Agreement. Our strategic partnership should facilitate transfer of high technologies to India. The lifting of U.S. export controls on high technology exports to India will open vast opportunities for giant research and development efforts. It will enable U.S. industry to benefit from the rapid economic and technological transformation that is now underway in our country. In a few weeks from now, the meeting of the conference of parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will take place in Copenhagen. Both President Obama and I have agreed on the need for a substantive and comprehensive outcome, which would cover mitigation, adaptation, finance, and technology. We reaffirmed our intention to work to this end bilaterally and with all other countries. We welcome the President's commitment to a major program for promotion of renewable energy, and I drew his attention to India's own ambitious national action plan on climate change, which has eight national missions covering both mitigation and adaptation. Just as we partnered each other in the shaping of the knowledge economy, we have the opportunity today to become partners in developing the green economy of the future. I underlined India's desire to benefit from clean and energy-efficient technologies from the United States. Our partnership will contribute to global efforts to combat climate change and achieve energy security. We had a detailed discussion on important regional and global issues. We agreed that the Indo-U.S. partnership was important for addressing the challenges of an increasingly interdependent world that we live in. The global economic crisis has brought home the fact that our prosperity is interlinked. Our dialogue covered the need to have an open and inclusive architecture in the Asia Pacific regions. It is important for the international community to sustain its engagement in Afghanistan, to help its emergence as a modern state. The forces of terrorism in our region pose a grave threat to the entire civilized world and have to be defeated. President Obama and I have decided to strengthen our cooperation in the area of counterterrorism. India welcomes the renewed international interest in nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. We have been a consistent advocate of a world free of nuclear weapons. We will work with the United States and other countries for the success of the nuclear security summit, which President Obama is hosting next April. In our discussions today, there was a meeting of minds on the future direction of our relations. I was deeply impressed by President Obama's strong commitment to the India-U.S. strategic partnership and by the breadth of his vision for global peace and prosperity. I have invited President Obama to visit India. A very warm welcome awaits him, his gracious wife and his two daughters.