The U.S. State Department’s Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, Donald Lu, spoke to The Hindu’s Sriram Lakshman in a wide-ranging interview, in which he discussed his forthcoming trip to Texas (June 15-17) to engage with the South Asian diaspora and companies, India’s security role, bilateral human rights discussions, and visas.
On the State Department’s push to engage domestically with the Indian and South Asian diaspora...
Well, I have had the great privilege of working on South Asia generally, but specifically India, since the mid-1990s. And what has been true then, and is very much true today, is that the heart of this relationship is not governments talking to each other. It’s not even businesses talking to each other. It’s families, right? It’s the interconnectedness. We have a million people travelling back and forth between the United States and India every year. And so we want to channel that. We want to make sure that we are listening to the diaspora, that we are responsive to their interests, but that we’re also engaging them and being part of making this relationship fuller and more developed. They’ve got a lot of great ideas, particularly on the commercial side. And we want to make full use of that.
