Remarks by External Affairs Minister Shri Pranab Mukherjee at the Valedictory session of the India-Africa Editors’ Conference

3rd April 2008

Secretary, Sh Nalin Surie,
Distinguished Editors from Africa and India,
Ladies and gentlemen,

It gives me great pleasure to be present here today at the Valedictory Session of the Editors’ Conference of India and Africa. In a few days’ time, India will host the India-Africa Forum Summit in Delhi. Your Conference today will, I am sure, prove to be a very useful element in the build-up to the Summit. All of you are, first and foremost, communicators and a meeting of minds between communicators from Africa and India is an essential step if we are to strengthen our mutual understanding and partnership.

“Building Bridges, Connecting Cultures” is the theme of your Conference and its importance is self-evident. The beautiful continent of Africa and our nation have had much in common in the past. We have both suffered under colonialism, which was characterized by exploitation and discrimination, and we have both emerged into the sunshine of freedom with the right to chart out our own destinies and the destinies of our peoples. This political legacy, its moral strength and the shared commitment to struggle against injustice, discrimination and exploitation of any kind remains a strong bond between us.

Two aspects of modern Indian have caught the attention of the world — one is our successful and unmatched democratic experiment, in which we have been able to give voice to a multi-religious, multi-ethnic and multilingual society. The second is the success story of our economy, which has been growing at a rate of 8 to 9%. Though we still have several challenges before us, both in the political as well in the socio-economic sectors, sixty years of independent decision-making have given us the confidence that we would be able to face these challenges successfully. In this context, African nations, with their own above average rates of growth and the huge potential of their economies, are ideal partners for India today.

Mahatma Gandhi, one of our most important and evocative links with the African continent, had stated: “Commerce between India and Africa will be of ideas and services, not of manufactured goods against raw materials after the fashion of western exploiters”. Unquote. India’s development assistance to African nations has a strong focus on empowerment of people through capacity building and connectivity. A multi-pronged approach has been adopted, which combines creative use of Lines of Credits with the deployment of Indian expertise to create assets in Africa and to establish high-tech projects. The development of local skills is part of all such projects. We have taken care that Indian involvement in the African economies should be cost effective and provide relevant and appropriate intermediate technologies. The spirit of partnership is further strengthened by the large number of trainees from several African nations, who have studied in India under the Indian Technical and Educational Cooperation Programme.

The possibilities of further cooperation, both economic and political, in the context of a multi-polar and globalised world, are enormous. The 54 countries of Africa and India continue to work together in international fora like the UN and WTO. We have common approaches to the challenges of global warming and climate change, HIV/ AIDS and other pandemics, as well as to global threats, such as terrorism.

Platforms like the Conference that you have all participated in today provide ample opportunity for a free discussion and exchange of ideas which can inform both our societies. I need not elaborate much on the role that an informed media can play in both the political as well as socio-economic growth of developing countries. The introduction of new ideas, the analysis of different trends, the protection and promotion of democracy, the encouragement of civil society and the exposure of corrupt practices are only some of the areas in which the media can play the lead role. I trust that your exchanges at this conference have been useful in identifying some of the common approaches that the media of the 21st century, both in India and on the African continent, can adopt in meeting these challenges.

I would invite all of you to continue the process that has been started by this Conference and build linkages which can become self-sustaining and permanent. Once again, I would particularly thank the distinguished visitors who have come all the way from Africa for this Conference, and also the Indo-Asian News Service, which has partnered with the Ministry of External Affairs in putting together this Conference.
I thank you.