Former US President, Jimmy Carter, who passed on at the age of 100 served in India in 1978, and during his visit, the then unknown village Carterpuri was renamed after him.
Jimmy Carter Died : A Former US President
Jimmy Carter, who enjoyed a very good relationship with India, passed away on Sunday from his home in Plains, Georgia in his sleep with his family beside him. He was a president who lived longest in the USA. He was the first American president to visit India after emergency and victory of Janata Party in the year 1977.
Jimmy Carter criticised authoritarianism in his speech to the Indian Parliament and condemned it and appreciated India for its democracy.
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The problems which India has, which we encounter and which are characteristic of the developing countries, give an idea about what awaits us. Not the Authoritarian Way,” Carter said on January 2, 1978.
“But India’s successes are just as important because they overwhelmingly reject the notion that in order to become economically and socially successful, a developing country has to embrace an authoritarian or totalitarian regime and all the wickedness to human spirituality such systems entail,” Mugal told members of parliament.
“Is democracy important? Is human freedom important to all races of the world? India has said yes to her in a voice which shook the world with its affirmation I would like to end my speech with the same note of affirmation.
A historic event occurred here last March not for the certain victory of the Liberal party or defeat of the Nationalist party but I presume because of the greatest number of voters of the human race that went to the polls to choose their leaders. In this sense, democracy itself fights and triumphed,” Jimmy Carter made this comment.
The next day at the signing of the Delhi declaration with then Prime Minister Morarji Desai, Jimmy Carter said that the essence of friendship between India and the US is the assurance that the people want the moral values must also govern the states and the governments.
“The United States presented the world with a model of a new type of government, with a new way of looking at the relationship between the citizen and the state — a relationship in which the state exists for the citizen, and not the other way round,” he said.
India for the first time tried to construct political unity on the substratum of sheer human histogram and it was possible because this sub continent of South Asia wanted common people of different languages and cultures and religions first to work for independence and later for freedom. Your is an experiment whose success the world is celebrating anew,” Carter said this in the Ashoka Hall of the Rashtrapati Bhawan.
Indian village named after Jimmy Carter
On 3 January 1978, Carter and the then First Lady, Rosalynn Carter visited a village in Daulatpur Nasirabad an hour of new Delhi.
Jimmy Carter’s Relation With India as a US President
He was third American president ever to visit India as well was probably the only one among them who had ever had professional link to the country as his mother Lillian had served there with the Peace Corps during the 1960s for serving the health needs of the country.
“The visit was so successful that shortly after, village residents renamed the area ‘Carterpuri’ and remained in contact with the White House for the rest of President Carter’s tenure,” the Carter Centre said.
“The trip made a lasting impression: Carnivals erupted in the village when President Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 while the third of January is still celebrated in Carterpuri,” noted the centre as saying that very visit paved the solid foundation for cooperative relationship that has since on enjoyed fruit bearing between the two countries.
President Carter realized that the basis for a long-time cooperation between the US and India was rooted in the fact that both states were democracies. It is, therefore, not unexpected that the two nations continued to increase their cooperation in the years following the countries leader’s time in office, it said.
“In fact, the US and India since Carter administration have cooperated across the sectors energy, humanitarian aid, technology, space cooperation, maritime security, disaster relief, counter-terrorism and more,” the centre stated.
The United States and India agreed in mid 2000s to begin negotiations to achieve full civil nuclear cooperation and the two country’s bilateral trade has climbed steeply it said.
The centre said, ‘In 2010, the first US-India Strategic Dialogue happened in Washington DC which set the tone for what Barack Obama described as ‘an unprecedented partnership’.
These bilateral relations from the Carter’s presidency to the Biden’s presidency are on a upward trajectory concerning both comprehensiveness and intensity. I also learned that there are many areas of ‘convergence of interests’ —most significantly in trade and defense — that close cooperation has led to the development of complex linkages between the two countries,” it said.
As Ronak D Desai, Partner and India Practice Leader at Paul Hastings said, Carter’s presidency remained a milestone in the US-India relations.
Especially after the strain caused by the notorious Nixon’s ‘tilt’ towards Pakistan during the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971, Carter had learned the significant need of embracing India as the new strategic catchword in a world that was rapidly transforming toward a fundamentally different multi-polar order.
His visit here in February 1978 therefore was not a mere photo opportunity but a serious undertaking to re-establish trust and the start of a process of cementing the framework for dialogue based on respect of differences and commonalities, he said.
“What Carter lacked in charisma, he more than made up for it in changing the trajectory of the US-India relations,” Desai said.
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