Obama Admin didn't get off to good start with India: Blackwill

Obama Administration did not get off to a very good start with India, a former US Ambassador to India has said but asserted that during the forthcoming presidential visit there will be enough aggregated forward movement that can put this perception behind.

"I think it's widely shared around the national security community in both countries that the Obama administration did not get off to a very good start with India," Robert Blackwill, former US Ambassador to India, told reporters in a briefing on President Obama's India visit.

He said when President Obama took office he faced global recession and two wars took his time up and he got distracted. And the Kashmir issue, which President during his campaign talked about a US diplomatic emissary to Kashmir, of course, "is anathema to India".

"Dick (Richard) Holbrooke's efforts to include India in his portfolio in that regard, and then US-China communique in Beijing which seemed to say that China had a role in South Asia and may be even in Kashmir, and then the IT services dispute and so forth," Blackwill said.

"So I think, yes, it got off to a rather rocky start. And again, to be fair on the Indian side, you have a complicated coalition government - and a lot of other things on the Indians' mind, too. I think that's why this visit is so important.

"And hopefully, in all the dimensions that I mentioned, there will be enough aggregated forward movement that we can put that perception behind us and the two governments can say to one another and to everybody else: Well, we might have gotten off to a kind of slow start here, but now watch our momentum. So that's what I think," Blackwill said.