have woven an exquisite tapestry. Out of diversity
we have brought unity. The several languages of
India speak with one voice under the roof of our
Parliament.

In your remarkable experiment as a nation state,
you have proven the same truth. Out of the huddled
masses that you welcomed to your shores you have
created a great nation.

For me the most gratifying of the many achieve-
ments of Indian democracy has been the change it
has brought to the lives of the weak and the vulner-
able.

To give just one figure, in recent years it has enabled
more than a million women in small towns and
distant villages to enter local elected councils and to
decide on issues that touch upon their lives.

Two years ago, while much of Asia was convulsed
by economic crisis, India held its course.

In the last ten years, we have grown at 6.5 per cent
per year: that puts India among the ten fastest grow-
ing economies of the world.

Economic activity gets more and more diversified by
the year: President Clinton and many among the
friends gathered here have had occasion to glimpse
our advances in information technology.

We are determined to sustain the momentum of our
economy: our aim is to double our per capita in-
come in ten years — and that means we must grow
at 9 per cent a year.

To achieve this order of growth we have ushered in
comprehensive reforms. We are committed to re-
leasing the creative genius of our people, the entre-
preneurial skills of the men and women of the coun-
try, of its scientists and craftsmen. At the same time,
we in India, remain committed to the primacy of the
State in fulfilling its social obligations to the de-
prived, the weak and the poor.

Important sectors of the country’s infrastructure —
power, insurance, banking, telecom — are being
opened to private initiative, domestic and foreign.

Trade barriers are being lowered.
Mr. Speaker, ladies and gentlemen,

There are forces outside our country that believe
that they can use terror to unravel the territorial
integrity of India. They wish to show that a multi-
religious society cannot exist.

They pursue a task in which they are doomed to fail.

No country has faced as ferocious an attack of ter-
rorist violence as India has over the past two decades:
21,000 were killed by foreign sponsored terrorists in
Punjab alone, 16,000 have been killed in Jammu and
Kashmir.

As many of you here in the Congress have in recent
hearings recognised a stark fact: no region is a greater
source of terrorism than our neighbourhood.

Indeed, in our neighbourhood — in this, the 21st
century — religious war has not just been fashioned
into, it has been proclaimed to be, an instrument of
State policy.

Distance offers no insulation. It should not cause
complacence.

You know, and | know: such evil cannot succeed.
But even in foiling it could inflict untold suffering.

That is why the United States and India have begun
to deepen their cooperation for combating terrorism.
We must redouble these efforts.

Mr. Speaker, ladies and gentlemen,

There was a time when we were on the other side
of each other’s globes. Today, on the digital map,
India and the United States are neighbours and part-
ners.

India and the United States have taken the lead in
shaping the information age. Over the last decade,
this new technology has sustained American pros-
perity in a way that has challenged conventional
wisdom on economic growth.

We are two nations blessed with extraordinary
resources and talent. Measured in terms of the in-
dustries of tomorrow, we are together defining the
partnerships of the future.

But our two countries have the potential to do more
to shape the character of the global economy in this
century.

We should turn the example of our own cooperation
into a partnership that uses the possibilities of the
new technologies for defining new ways of fighting
poverty, illiteracy, hunger, disease and pollution.

See PRIME MINISTER'S ADDRESS, Page 4

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