India has great global power potential: US

With President Barack Obama looking at India as a potential great global power in the 21st century, US wants to deepen its economic, political, and security cooperation with New Delhi.

"Our relationship with India is strong, growing," State Department Spokesperson Mark Toner told reporters here on Tuesday in response to a question about the direction of US-India relations after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's second visit to the US last month.

As President Barack "Obama said, India has the potential to be one of the great global powers in the 21st century, so we want to see our cooperation deepen both economically, politically, and on security issues as well," Toner said.

In response to another question about the India-Pakistan relationship, he said: "It's absolutely critical to achieving peace and stability in South Asia."

On terrorism, the spokesperson said, "Obviously, it's a shared concern not just between our country and India... but obviously, for many countries in that region."

Toner noted that Obama, who had his third bilateral summit meeting with Modi in one year in New York last moth, had reiterated that the perpetrators financiers, sponsors of the November 26, 2008, Mumbai terror attack must be held accountable for their crimes.

"We continue to follow the criminal proceedings closely and urge additional action to prevent such an attack from ever happening again and recognise that this was a terrible tragedy for India," he said.

"In general, we want to see better, stronger, closer counter-terrorism cooperation not only between the US and India but of all the countries in the region, including Pakistan," Toner said.

"We all need to be on our guard. We all need to be vigilant," he said.

"We all need to cooperate and share information and intelligence... in order to prevent future attacks. It's not something we can let our guard down on."

(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)