Global crisis makes Indo-US ties more important: Menon

Washington, March 12 (PTI) India's Foreign Secretary
Shivshanker Menon on Wednesday said that the current global
crisis makes Indo-US economic co-operation all the more
significant.

Menon said the current global economic crisis figured
prominently during his meetings with officials of the Obama
Administration and Congressional leaders in his four-day trip
here.

"We also recognise during these conversations the need
for India and the US to work together and with other countries
to address the global economic crisis," Menon said.

"We agreed that the upcoming meeting of the G-20 leaders
in London in April provides an important opportunity to pursue
that goal," he told Indian reporters at a press briefing
before leaving for India.

"In fact, the current economic crisis makes the India-US
dialogue and economic cooperation even more significant," he
observed.

Menon hoped that health permitting India's Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh would attend the G-20 summit. "I hope that both
(Obama and Singh) would be meeting. We are looking forward to
that. It’s an important conversation," he said.

Responding to a question, Menon said India feels that
"protectionism" would be the wrong answer to the current
economic crisis. (

"Protectionism in any form would only means that we are
digging a deeper hole for the economies.

"If we look at the experience in the (1930s) when people
resorted to protectionist measures, they thought they were
protecting their own economy; the net effect actually was to
make it much harder for the recovery to take place. Frankly we
speak from the historical experience and from the sheer
economic situation," he argued.

India's views on protectionism, Menon said is not
confined to India alone. "It is a sentiment that I heard,
expressed on the Hill and various other US interlocutors."

"There is an economic crisis and we all need to devise
methods to deal with it. The financial part of it, we started
dealing with, but there is also an economic crisis in the
world today, and I think that is where we need to look at
dealing with," he said.

The G-20 meeting in London, which is the second such
meeting, would be one opportunity, "but we also would be
looking at this bilaterally", Menon said. PTI LKJ
RAI