Given the sensitivity of Indians on UN Security Council aspirations, US President Barack Obama during his forthcoming visit to India will either make a big positive impact or disappoint it, a former top American diplomat to New Delhi has said.
"Will the President, while he is in India and probably while he is speaking to the Parliament, utter the words, 'The United States supports India's permanent membership in a reformed UN Security Council' or not?
"If he does, it'll have a very, very positive effect on both the people of India, and on the national security elite of India. If he does not, they'll be disappointed," Robert Blackwill, former US Ambassador to India, told reporters in a briefing on Obama's India visit.
"I'm not now going to do the merits of the case on that, but he'll either make a big positive impact or disappoint them," Blackwill said, who currently is Henry Kissinger Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations - a prestigious US-based think tank.
As Obama arrives in the West Indian city of Mumbai later this week on a three-day India visit - his longest overseas trip as the US President - Blackwill said Indians will be watching most carefully for the president's position on the Security Council and on the entities list.
"I think that my prescription would be that he say to the Indian Parliament, which would get them on their feet with rapturous applause, that the US supports India's permanent membership in the Security Council in the context of a reformed Security Council.
"That's a very direct way of saying it. And if he uses more equivocal language, of course, the Indian scribes will take the more equivocal language apart a sentence and a -- or, sorry, a phrase and a word at a time," he said.
"Just to put one more fact forward: Now the US and China are the only two countries that are permanent members of the Security Council that have not endorsed India's membership -- permanent membership in the Security Council.
So, I don't think that's very good company for the US to be keeping on this issue. So I very much hope he'll say that to the Parliament," Blackwill said.