White House clarification on Golden Temple visit

Washington: President Barack Obama's tight schedule in Mumbai and New Delhi has prevented him to put Golden Temple and other places in India out of his itinerary when he visits the country later this week, the White House has said.

"We had a very full schedule in three days that frankly, unfortunately prevented us from being able to go to all the places that you might have wanted to visit during a trip to India, which of course would include something like the Golden Temple.

"It is such an extraordinarily important site, not just to Sikhs, but one that is widely respected for extraordinary charitable work it does as well," Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communication said. Rhodes and other top US officials were responding to questions at "Tuesday Talks at the White House", a live web cast from the White House on the forthcoming 10-day Asia trip of the US President.

"I think it would be wrong to say this was cancelled," Rhodes said in response to a question about reports that Obama had cancelled his trip to Golden Temple.

Terming India as "a huge extraordinary country" Rodhes said that when we visit a place like India, we look at many different places to potentially visit.

"We send out advance teams to look at scores of sites, including far more places than the president would ever have time to visit. Frankly, he'd love to go to India for far more than three days and have the opportunity to visit multiple cities," he explained.

The White House official said that they had settled on Mumbai and New Delhi while preparing President Obama's schedule as they had just three days of the visit.

"That was to serve the principal purposes of the visit, which include a business summit in Mumbai on the first day, when we are going to talk about deepening our economic cooperation with India, to include some Diwali celebration and a town hall with some university students in Mumbai.

"And then there's a very extended official portion of the visit in New Delhi that includes all of the president's meetings with senior Indian officials and Prime Minister, a state dinner and a separate dinner with the Prime Minister the first night we're in New Delhi," Rhodes said.

He termed it "unfortunate" and said "hopefully we will have an opportunity to go back to India in the future during the Obama presidency and visit a broader spectrum of sites."

The official said that though the three-day programme feels short in some respect but it's actually the longest amount of time the President will have spent in any foreign country as President.

"And that underscores, I think, the importance of India to us and to our foreign policy," he argued.