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| Afghanistan/South Asia |
| No Indian national in al-Qaeda - Singh |
| 2005-06-27 |
| Declaring India's democracy to be a model for Islamic countries, External Affairs Minister K. Natwar Singh Monday said the biggest measure of its success was that no Indian was a member of terrorist group Al Qaeda. "We have the second largest Muslim and second largest Shia population in the world," Singh, departing from his prepared speech, told a gathering at the Royal Institute for International Affairs here. "Yet, not a single Indian out of our 150 million Muslims has joined the Al Qaeda. This is a fact that is not often recognised," Singh said during his keynote address to a two-day conference on "India - the next decade". Singh's wide-ranging speech dwelt on the entire gamut of India's foreign policy in the coming decade and presented a picture of an India determined to play a larger role in world affairs. "The existing world needs to take into cognisance the aspirations and hopes of the Islamic world," he said. "India is a good example of how this can be done through democratic and consensual means, thereby strengthening the forces of coherence and integration within societies." Singh's speech signalled the renewal of an outward-looking foreign policy for India - one that embraced what he called the "new realities" such as economic globalisation, Islamic aspirations, global poverty, challenge of terrorism and nuclear non-proliferation. "It seems to me, from what respectable forecasting institutions have projected, that India - together with China - is more the flavour of the century than the decade," he said. "In the next decade we could see India position itself for greater accomplishments as the century progresses. There are no precedents for managing a democracy of 1.2 billion people," said Singh as British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who shared the stage with him, nodded vigorously. "For ourselves, we seek, first and foremost, security and economic prosperity. These objectives must motivate India's interaction with the world in all matters, whether political, economic, strategic or cultural." Revealing some aspects of Indian calculations for the future, Singh pointed out that a decade from now the world population would reach 7.2 billion people, 1.4 billion of whom would be Chinese and 1.2 billion Indian. "Of the Indian population, some 68 percent, or more than 820 million people, will be in the active working age group of 21 to 51. By 2015, the technological, demographic and social changes of Asia will influence every aspect of global and local existence." |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |