Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, left, addressing the crowd at a recent fund-raiser for Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry in Plainfield, NJ. Congressman Frank Pallone is seen at center and John Kerry’s brother Cam Kerry is at right. (Photo, as it appears on http://palloneforcongress.com)

Congressman Frank Pallone (D-NJ), who co-founded the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans, said his goal is not to indulge in Pakistan bashing but rather to help improve relations between India and Pakistan. He conceded he was against outsourcing but emphasized that outsourcing to India had been overplayed by many and pointed to the fact that Mexico and China got far more jobs outsourced from the United States than did India.

In an exclusive interview with News India-Times, Rep. Pallone countered accusations from his Republican opponent Sylvester Fernandez, that he had not delivered legislation that favored India over the years, but noted he was against any kind of military assistance to Pakistan.

“My goal isn’t to create tension between India and Pakistan. I have always been an advocate for peace between the two. I don’t envision my role in the Caucus as a forum for bashing Pakistan. If anything, our caucus has tried to bring the two together. Ideally, we would like to see an economic union, improved trade, a south Asian economic union.”

A six-term congressman, Rep. Pallone has a larger number of Indian Americans in his 6th district in New Jersey than any other United States lawmaker.

“The only thing I have ever been opposed to is military assistance to Pakistan because I feel that if United States provides military assistance, it would be used against India. So after 9/11, when there was a lifting of sanctions against both India and Pakistan and the Bush administration started providing military assistance to Pakistan, I had problems with that and I opposed that. So I have introduced legislation that prohibits military assistance to Pakistan.”

Most recently, on the F-16s, when the Financial Times reported that Pakistan defense minister spoke of negotiating a deal with Washington, Pallone shot off letters of protest to, among others, Secretary of State Colin Powell. “The other thing is that I have always pushed for is democracy in Pakistan. So whenever Musharraf has tried to impose more of a dictatorship and now when he was wanting to continue to be military chief, I have always opposed that. Because I believe the only way the two countries can be closer is for Pakistan to become a democracy.”

Over the years, Rep. Pallone and other members of the India and Indian American Caucus have blocked Indian-basher Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) from getting through Congress a bill to stop any aid to India. While India gets virtually no aid from Washington, Burton has tried to win a symbolic victory on getting India blacklisted.

“Every year he (Burton) would try to cut assistance to India, and we have tried to immobilize that,” Rep. Pallone recalled. “Because you know, that Indian government does not seek aid, but every time we proposed any kind of help, even on Gujarat after the earthquake, the Indian government opposed it. They are very proud and they don’t seek humanitarian assistance,” he added.

The congressman said he, as part of the Congressional Caucus, had worked against the sanctions on India following the 1998 nuclear tests on the subcontinent. “We worked on getting those rescinded, to the point that they are all gone, except the dual use technology and even that is now going.”

As for the Indian-American community, Pallone was among many on the Caucus to get the legislative outlay of half a million dollars for a study of the incidence of diabetes and heart disease within this ethnic group.

In an earlier interview, the Republican candidate Fernandez told News India-Times that the main reason he was opposing Pallone was because of the Congressman’s stand on outsourcing. At the same time, Fernandez said he was worried about jobs going overseas at the cost of American workers.

“I’ve always taken the position that outsourcing is not beneficial to the U.S.,” Rep. Pallone conceded in the interview. “One of the things I stressed is that the outsourcing to India is overplayed. United States sends jobs to China and Mexico in greater numbers.

“He (Fernandez) is right when he says that I oppose outsourcing and is also right that I opposed it when I went to India, but I have always said that outsourcing to other countries is more than to India. I still opposed outsourcing. What I said in January was that to counteract it, Indian companies should invest in the U.S. And one of the things we did was go to Ranbaxy company which is on the outskirts of Delhi, to show they hadd offices in New Jersey and created 500 jobs.

“Second thing I said was that India needed to lower barriers to U.S. exports and we went around to show a few examples of how exports to India could be increased, e.g. agricultural equipment. One of the things that happened while I was there was that Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee announced he would increase Indian companies’ investments in the U.S. by a hundred percent,” he said.

Rep. Pallone noted that the largest concentration of Indian Americans was in his Congressional district. And in his interaction with them, he found that in large part, they had similar concerns to those of all Americans. He accused the Bush administration of giving tax breaks to companies investing overseas.

“I don’t know why he (Fernandez) is stressing outsourcing to India so much. I think that for those of us who know about it, we should stress that jobs are being outsourced to other countries in overwhelming amounts. The bottom line is outsourcing is not good and we have to find ways to diminish it and one of the ways is to improve the tax structure here.”