Prime Minister Narendra Modi will embark on a significant three-nation tour starting from March 30 onwards, during which he will attend the Nuclear Security Summit in the US, where Pakistan PM Nawaz S
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will embark on a significant three-nation tour starting from March 30 onwards, during which he will attend the Nuclear Security Summit in the US, where Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif would also be present.
Mr Modi will begin his tour by travelling to Belgium to participate in the India-European Union Summit. From there he will proceed to the US for taking part in the NSS. In the last leg of his tour, he will visit Saudi Arabia to hold deliberations on key regional and bilateral issues centring on trade and energy.
His visit, which comes nearly six years after the last Prime Ministerial visit to Riyadh, assumes significance given the current regional situation and strained ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran, another strategically important country for India.
Apart from being India’s largest supplier of crude oil, accounting for almost one-fifth of its need, it is also India’s fourth largest trading partner. Saudi Arabia has the largest Indian diaspora. The Prime Minister’s visit to Saudi Arabia will be preceded by a trip to Washington for NSS.
While officials are tight-lipped about a possible interaction between Mr Modi and Mr Sharif, experts feel that since both the leaders have held impromptu meetings in the recent past, it will be difficult for them to avoid each other completely.
This would be the first time after Mr Modi’s unannounced and brief visit to Lahore on December 25 that the two leaders will be at the same place.
Since then, the Pathankot terror attack has happened which has delayed the Indo-Pak foreign secretary-level talks, scheduled to take place in early January after the two countries announced resumption of comprehensive talks during external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj’s visit to Islamabad in December last year.
In Belgium, the Prime Minister will be attending the India-EU Summit after a gap of four years. The last summit had taken place in 2012. India-EU ties witnessed some strain after the 28-member bloc had not responded to India’s proposal for a brief visit by Mr Modi to Brussels, the EU headquarters, during his trip to France, Germany and Canada in April last year. This had prompted New Delhi to give a cold shoulder to the EU’s efforts to finalise Mr Modi’s visit last November when he travelled to the UK.
Efforts were also on to work out issues and announce resumption of stalled India-EU free trade talks during Mr Modi’s visit. Top officials of India and the EU met last week in Brussels to review the stalled negotiations with an aim to assess where both sides stand and how they could go forward with the proposed pact, officially dubbed as Bilateral Trade and Investment agreement.
The last round of trade talks happened in May 2013. In August 2015, India deferred the talks on the FTA after the EU imposed ban on 700 products, clinically tested by GVK Biosciences.
