In India, Bush Urges Americans to Welcome Global Competition
By Elisabeth Bumiller
The New York Times
Friday 03 March 2006
New Delhi - President Bush met with Indian entrepreneurs and toured an
agricultural university during a four-hour trip to the southern city of
Hyderabad today, when he said that the United States should welcome rather
than fear competition from India.
"People do lose jobs as a result of globalization and it's painful for
those who lose jobs," Mr. Bush said at meeting with young entrepreneurs at
Hyderabad's Indian School of Business, one of the premier schools of its
kind in India. Nonetheless, the president said, "globalization provides
great opportunities."
Mr. Bush, reiterating a theme of his trip, strongly defended the
outsourcing of American jobs to India as the reality of a global economy,
and said that the United States should instead focus on India as a vital new
market for American goods. Hyderabad is a center of India's booming
high-tech industry, and was also on President Bill Clinton's itinerary when
he visited India in 2000.
"The classic opportunity for our American farmers and entrepreneurs and
small businesses to understand is there is a 300 million-person market of
middle class citizens here in India, and that if we can make a product they
want, that it becomes viable," Mr. Bush said at the business school.
At an earlier stop at Hyderabad's Acharya N.G. Ranga Agricultural
University, Mr. Bush watched Indian women in saris hand-till the soil around
tomatoes, peanuts and soybeans. One of the women gave Mr. Bush a thumbs'-up
sign as he walked past. The president also viewed a water buffalo and some
Indian handcrafts.
Shops in the city's predominately Muslim Charminar quarter were closed
in protest of the president's visit, the Associated Press reported. Several
hundred communist and Muslim demonstrators chanted "Bush go home" and
carried posters of Osama bin Laden.
Mr. Bush returned to New Delhi later in the day to deliver an outdoor
evening speech at the city's Purana Qila, a 16th century fort built by the
Afghan conqueror Sher Sha Suri. In the speech, billed as the major address
of Mr. Bush's trip to India, Mr. Bush spoke of the "natural partnership"
between the United States and India, including the major nuclear pact that
he and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India announced in New Delhi on
Thursday.
The pact, which fills in the broad outlines of a plan that was
negotiated in July, would help India satisfy its huge civilian energy needs
while allowing it to continue to develop nuclear weapons.
In the speech, Mr. Bush said the two countries were also united in the
struggle against terrorism, noting that "both our nations know the pain of
terrorism on our own soil."
The "two great purposes" of the partnership were "to expand the circle
of prosperity and development across the world, and to defeat our common
enemy by advancing the noble cause of human freedom," he said.
After the speech, Mr. Bush was scheduled to fly to Islamabad for an
overnight stay and meetings with the Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez
Musharraf, on Saturday. Mr. Bush said on Thursday that he was still making
the trip despite a bombing near the U.S. consulate in Karachi on Thursday
morning that left four dead, including an American diplomat.
Mr. Bush's overnight stay and day of events in Islamabad is in sharp
contrast to Mr. Clinton's trip to the Pakistani capital in March 2000, when
he arrived by an unmarked military plane and spent barely six hours there.
White House officials acknowledge the security problems in a country
where Osama bin Laden is believed to be in hiding, but said they were
manageable.
"Pakistan is both an ally in the war on terror and, in some sense, a
site where the war is being carried about," Stephen J. Hadley, the national
security adviser, told reporters in New Delhi on Thursday.
Mr. Hadley added that "at this point, people are comfortable that the
necessary precautions are in place, but this is not a risk-free
undertaking."
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Embrace outsourcing for Bush's wealthy few.
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