US, Russia leaders to visit India

By Hao Zhou

Presidents of the US, France and Russia, and possibly China, are planning to visit India and bring the country huge commercial contracts in the next two months, the Times of India reported Monday.

US President Barack Obama is scheduled to visit India this weekend, with commercial deals worth $15 billion between the US and India in sight, the newspaper reported in an article titled "India at center of global biz, politics."

Beleaguered at home, French President Nicholas Sarkozy will visit India from December 6 and sign a billion-dollar deal to upgrade Mirage fighter planes owned by India's air force, as well as the first France-India commercial nuclear contract, it said.

Following Sarkozy, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is also expected to sign a slew of defense deals and reaffirm an old friendship with India, the report added.

At a meeting in Hanoi on Friday, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao also said he was considering a visit to India at the end of this year on an invitation by his Indian counterpart, Manmohan Singh.

The short-term attraction (to the visiting heads of states) is the defense orders ... and the long-term attraction is the Indian market, which is ex-pected to "soon beat China in growth rate," the newspaper said.

Amit Mitra, secretary-general of the Federation of the Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, told the newspaper that India today is perceived as a member of the top table in global geopolitics.

"That's why these countries are seeking to engage with us and trying to marry our synergies with their core competencies," Mitra said, adding that India is the only balancing factor for China in Asia.

However, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday that during Obama's visit, "one elephant in the room will be Afghanistan and grow-ing concern in New Delhi that the US will not look out for India's interests as it seeks a way out."

New Delhi's concerns are being stoked by the fact that Pakistan last month received $2 billion in US military aid, the paper added.

"Leaders of world powers just happened to visit India one after another in a short period, but it doesn't mean India's international influence has virtually improved," Fu Xiaoqiang, a researcher of South Asian Studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, told the Global Times.

"India has developed rapidly in past years, and it has already been recognized as a nuclear power. Then the desire of a few nationalists in India to let the country be a pole in the multilateral world starts to inflate," Fu said. "However, compared with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, India is only bigger than Russia in terms of economy."