India's premier hosted a lunch on Friday for former US President George W. Bush and called him a "great friend" who played a key role in ending the South Asian country's long nuclear isolation. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who enjoyed a strong rapport with Bush during his White House tenure, threw the lunch in the former president's honour in the Indian capital New Delhi.
Ruling Congress party president Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi, who is a member of parliament and seen as a potential Indian premier, attended the lunch along with other leading Indian political figures. Singh also held a one-on-one meeting with Bush to discuss global issues, the Press Trust of India reported.
Speaking the same day at a leadership conference, the Indian leader also hailed Bush for his pivotal role in pushing through a pact which reversed a US ban on civilian nuclear trade with India. "Former president George W. Bush is a great friend of our country," Singh told the forum, where Bush was slated to speak on Saturday. "We in India recognise the important role he played in the fruition of the civil nuclear co-operation initiative," said Singh, who last year told Bush that the "people of India deeply love you".
The Texan is credited with pushing laws through the US Congress lifting a more-than-three-decade embargo against India's civilian nuclear programme and allowing New Delhi access to Western technology and cheap atomic energy. It was during Bush's tenure that India and the US moved from "bitter estrangement to tentative engagement" over a whole range of issues, said analyst Uday Bhaskar, director of the National Maritime Foundation think-tank.
Bush is due to address the leadership conference on Saturday on the topic of the United States "re-engaging" with the world. Bush left the White House in January with rock-bottom approval ratings and has made few public appearances since, avoiding publicly criticising his successor Barack Obama, who has made international diplomacy a priority. Earlier this year, Bush visited South Korea for a trade meeting.
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