India, US 'going hard after bad guys': Robert Blackwill

"The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US Customs Service have intensified beyond recognition their cooperative activities with Indian colleagues to investigate terrorism, major crimes, money laundering, smuggling and customs violations," he said.

Blackwill, who returns to Washington shortly at the end of a two-year tenure as the US envoy to New Delhi, was speaking on "The future of Indo-US relations" at a farewell function organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).

Speaking about the "extraordinary change" that had taken place in bilateral relations in the last two years, Blackwill said, "No longer does Washington regard India as an acute and abiding international proliferation risk that must be carefully managed and constantly lectured.

"We regularly share information to detect and counter potential terrorist attacks, and strengthen and strengthen out respective homeland security," he said and recalled the two countries signed a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty in October 2001 to counter criminal activities more effectively.

Blackwill said till President George W Bush took office in January 2001, India had not been on Washington's primary policy agenda "except for a persistent US preoccupation with India as a nuclear proliferation problem of the first magnitude."

"India was not seen in Washington as an essential and cooperative part of solution to major international problems. Rather, India was one of the problems - a nuclear renegade whose policies threatened the entire non-proliferation regime," he said.

That impression had changed with Bush's "big idea" that by working together more intensely than ever before, the US and India, two vibrant democracies, could make the word "freer, more peaceful and more prosperous," Blackwill said.

"No longer does the US fixate on India's nuclear weapons and missile programmes. No more constant American nagging nanny on these subjects and no longer does the US largely view its relationship with India through a prism that must always include India's next door neighbour," he said.

While things have changed for the better, he acknowledged there had been disagreements on the issue of Iraq. "But this time, contrary to the dismal decades of the Cold War, we have disagreed in our official exchanges concerning Iraq without vitriol, without accusations and without inflamed rhetoric."

He said Washington had "obviously hoped" India would send troops to Iraq. "But the transformation of US-India relations that I am describing will not be affected in the slightest by this particular outcome of India's governmental democratic processes," he added.