India's Ambassador to the United States, Lalit Mansingh, on Thursday criticised the Bush administration for making Pakistan a 'major non-NATO ally'.

"Let me start by expressing our deep disappointment with what has happened," Mansingh said following his keynote speech at a conference entitled 'US-India Bilateral Cooperation: Taking Stock and Moving Forward', organised by the Sigur Centre for Asian Studies at George Washington University. "The disappointment is on account on both substance and style."

"Now, it is the prerogative of the United States to do anything it likes with Pakistan. But you cannot remove the hyphen on paper and keep the hyphen in your mind, and say we have to do this for India, in which case we must do that for Pakistan," the envoy said.

He said the explanation given to India "made things worse when we were told that it wasn't important enough to share with you.

"Then we're told, no big deal, we've been discussing it for months and months, so what is the big surprise. And three, if India wants it, we can also give it to you. So this has left a certain bitterness."

He said one of the biggest achievements "in my mind of the dialogue we had with the United States is the establishment of a level of trust.

"When President [Bill] Clinton went to India, there were apprehensions, would the United States do what it has done in the past, saying things we want to hear in India, then go to Pakistan and say things that Pakistan wanted to hear. What impressed us most about President Clinton was he said exactly the same things in both capitals.

"Now this is what we expect in a strategic partnership."

He added, "But we are not allowing this to come in the way of our realtionship.Right now as we speak we have a high-level delegation at the State Department having discussions with [Assistant Secretary of State] Christina Rocca on our bilateral relationship.So I think we've reached a level of maturity.But this is something we could have done without."