Singh to Bush: “The people of India deeply love you.”
Improving ties with India a success.
HYDERABAD, India: Manmohan Singh leads the largest democracy on Earth. But the Indian prime minister is gentle of manner and speaks in whispers. One struggles to imagine him professing love without shyness to his own wife. And so it meant something when he recently laid the L-word on a little-loved man: George W. Bush.
“This may be my last visit to you during your presidency,” Singh told the U.S. president in Washington in September, “and let me say, thank you very much. The people of India deeply love you.”
Among the least coveted jobs in the world today, along with grave digging, is the task of burnishing Bush’s foreign legacy: the complex, competing challenges of Iraq, Afghanistan, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Iran, Venezuela, Russia, North Korea, China and what many in Europe and the developing world see as a tarnished national brand.
It is possible that the love-fest stoked by Singh and Bush will, with time, come to be seen as Bush’s enduring overseas accomplishment: the cultivation of India, long prickly about empires, as a partner of the sole superpower.
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