Rajiv Gandhi was interested in US military ties: CIA document

Washington, August 4 : Rajiv Gandhi was “genuinely interested” in developing military ties with the US and the former Indian prime minister had shown he could move India’s foreign policy in new directions, according to a declassified CIA document.
Gandhi’s visits to then Soviet Union, the Middle East, France, and the US from May 1985 — nearly seven months after he was sworn in — “showed he is able to move Indian foreign policy in new directions and to do so in a more pragmatic, less emotionally charged style than his predecessors,” the US Directorate of Intelligence said in the document.
A sanitised copy of the classified 11-page report was released by the CIA in December 2016 along with several other documents related to India.
The document said Gandhi “signalled that India was ready to enhance significantly its economic, particularly technological, ties to the United States and Western Europe”. According to the report dated August 1, 1985, three signals emerged from Gandhi’s foreign visits about his “evolving personal and diplomatic style”.”First, his apparent willingness to give a fair hearing to other points of view strongly suggests that he is motivated to try to cut through emotionally charged issues to get to problem-solving. This has, in our view, been played out in his ‘step-by-step’ approach to improving relations with the US and Pakistan and to resolving the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict in Sri Lanka,” it said. “These relationships also give Gandhi a more strongly held personal stake in making progress in improving relations in South Asia,” according to the document.