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US denies favouring Pak over India

US state department spokesman James Rubin last night sought to debunk the popular impression in India that the Bill Clinton administration had favoured Pakistan at the cost of India in easing the economic sanctions that the US had imposed on the two countries in protest against their May nuclear tests.

Replying to a question about the US proposal to bail out cash-starved Pakistan through multilateral agencies while keeping intact a ban on the grant of non-humanitarian World Bank loans to India, he said, ''I think there's been a grave misunderstanding if people think that India had to pay for the assistance that we (US) might want to provide to Pakistan.''

He said, ''India should consider it a bonus and a plus that they don't have the kind of financial crisis that exists in Pakistan, and wouldn't think they would want to get equal treatment with Pakistan, because to do so, they would need to be in financial crisis, which is not something, I think, any responsible government would want to see.''

''What we've done with respect to Pakistan is make a decision that it is not in anybody's interest -- Pakistan, India, or any of the countries in the region -- to have a financial collapse there (in Pakistan) and made some emergency decisions that will not necessarily affect any other decisions that are non-humanitarian or non-basic human needs decisions,'' Rubin said.

He said, ''I would hope that the people of India would be very thankful that they're not getting the same treatment as Pakistan, because it means they are not in a financial crisis.''

Rubin said, ''When we were trying to look at what was a representative programme, we had to go back to the time before these sanctions were in effect, and only India had such programmes, to the tune of several hundred million dollars.''

''So I don't think people should look at this as discrimination, they should be thankful that they don't have the kind of financial crisis that caused this emergency action (in case of Pakistan),'' Rubin said, adding, "But let's bear in mind, some important decisions had been made.''

He said, ''We made a decision to respond positively to the positive steps that both India and Pakistan took on the nuclear weapons testing issue and on the export control issue.''

He, however, said, ''We still have a long way to go with respect to the restraints on deployment of nuclear missiles systems. We wanted to respond positively, create the best possible environment for the additional decisions we think are necessary.''

UNI

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