External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will head to Beijing later this month to participate in the annual trilateral meeting with Russia and China.
>Ms. Swaraj, currently in Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar for the ASEAN Regional Forum meet, will be meeting Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on August 29th as part of the annual trilateral meet among the the three countries.
Ms. Swaraj’s participation in the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), where she met with the Foreign Ministers of the regional forum, is her first in a multilateral event.
Among others, Ms. Swaraj met Mr. Wang Yi on Saturday.
She had met Mr. Yi in June—her first meeting with a foreign minister of another nation after the Narendra Modi government came to power.
“The two reviewed the movement of bilateral relations since then [June],” MEA spokesperson Syed Akbaruddin said. Besides China, Ms. Swaraj held meetings with the Foreign Ministers of Australia, Brunei, Canada, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam.
With her Australian counterpart Julie Bishop, Ms. Swaraj discussed issues related to the proposed Indo-Australian civil nuclear agreement.
She also discussed possibilities of greater cooperation with Brunei in the petroleum sector, especially export of LNG from Brunei to India. Philippines shared with India their triple action plan and their approach to the South China Sea.
Ms. Swaraj pledged India’s support to the ASEAN Economic Community, to be established in 2015, and emphasised on greater connectivity, between India and the ASEAN, “in all its dimensions, geographic, institutional and people-to-people.”
Addressing the 12th India-ASEAN Foreign Ministers meeting, she suggested India, Myanmar and Thailand begin negotiations on a Transit Transport Agreement “at the earliest so that this can be concluded by the time the Trilateral Highway completes in 2016.”
