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Union Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha arrived in Boston, Massachusetts, to undergo surgery for a kidney ailment, diplomatic sources in Washington have acknowledged.
However, the sources asserted that the operation was not major surgery but more of a preventive nature and that Sinha would be in hospital and follow-up treatment for about a week and a maximum of ten days, after which he would return to India.
Meanwhile, the sources said the earlier programme which Sinha was to link up with his visit to the US for his medical check-up, which included delivering speeches at Stanford University and Harvard University, before he enters hospital for surgery, had been scrapped.
"The earlier speaking engagements at Stanford and Harvard have now been dropped and he has come just for his surgery," one source said.
The source reiterated that Sinha would not be visiting Washington either for any meetings with World Bank president James Wolfensohn, with whom sources say he has a "very close relationship and have now become good friends," or to address the US India Business Council parley scheduled for June 19-20.
But while Sinha is in Boston purely for personal reasons, Communications Minister Ram Vilas Paswan is already in the US -- in Atlanta, Ga, for a communications conference while making a bee-line to escape the scorching Delhi summer heat later this month would be National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra who talks with his counterpart Condoleezza Rice, Information and Broadcasting Minister Sushma Swaraj, who will keynote the USIBC conference, Power Minister Suresh Prabhu and India's point man for information technology Pramod Mahajan.
Diplomatic sources said that at about this time Congress president and opposition leader Sonia Gandhi may also visit Washington for meetings with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and some senior White House officials such as Rice.
But the sources said they had not been given any definitive instructions regarding Gandhi's visit and hence it was still in the possible phase.
The sources said with regard to Mishra's visit, they were also trying to fix up some appointments with Armitage and possibly Secretary of State Colin Powell if he can spare some time, although it was highly unlikely that either the State Department or the White House would host a luncheon meeting for Mishra like was accorded External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh, who also holds the defence portfolio.
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