Meeting with Musharraf a significant step: PM

An upbeat Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Friday described his meeting with Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf as a "significant step forward" and said a "new beginning" has been made in promotion of high technology flows into India from the US.

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Singh, who is on the final leg of his nine-day visit to Britain and the US, brushed aside criticism of his travelling as a "salesman" wooing foreign investors. "I am certainly here to sell India and to explain to the rest of the world what India is doing," he told a press conference in New York.

In his hour-long press conference, the prime minister fielded questions on a range of issues covering Indo-Pak relations, emerging strategic partnership with the US and spoke of his government's determination to make India an attractive investment destination.

On the issue of cross-border terrorism and why there was no mention of it in the joint statement issued after his talks with Musharraf, Singh said he had raised the issue and conveyed "unambiguously" that the starting point of the whole dialogue was the commitment given by Pakistan in January that territory under its control will not be used for terrorist purposes against India.

"We cannot discuss any substantive issues and CBMs if terrorist acts are not controlled. Therefore, there should be no doubt that this is the pre-condition for moving forward. I did raise it," Singh said adding that the Pakistan president "recognised" that this is the situation.

Describing their one-to-one meeting as "very frank", he said there was an "easy flow of conversation. There was
never a dull moment".

Singh said Musharraf "spoke with great sincerity about his desire to improve relations between our two countries and also told me that he was grossly misunderstood in India and many other countries and he is wrongly regarded as a unifocal person."

The prime minister said both he and Musharraf agreed that dialogue is the only way forward to find a solution to all outstanding issues between the two countries.

"India is completely sincere about finding solutions that will let us put the unhappy past behind. We have both
agreed on this approach," he said.

Singh said the joint statement issued on Friday commits the two countries to advance "beyond" what was agreed to in
the January 6 statement both in terms of discussing CBMs as well as addressing "complex" issues relating to the
state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Terming his maiden meeting with President George W Bush as "very important", Singh said Bush has made a personal contribution in strengthening Indo-US relations and "I appreciate his meeting me in the midst of his election pre-occupation."

Singh said he had conveyed to him India's interest in strengthening bilateral relationship, particularly its strategic dimension.

Highlighting new opportunities to strengthen Indo-US economic relationship, Singh said this was reflected in his meeting with American CEOs at the New York Stock Exchange, the first-ever by an Indian prime minister.

"I saw in it an opportunity to emphasise India's credentials as a very attractive investment destination," Singh said adding he had proposed they should establish a group which could make recommendations on what should be done to achieve the objective of FDI inflows of $ 10 billion annually.

Touching on his address to the UN General Assembly, Singh said the broad themes he emphasised were India's commitment to multilateralism, and UN reforms to enable the world body to refashion itself to become relevant to present times while outlining the reasons for why India should be a permanent member of the UN Security Council.