One of India’s finest Prime Ministers (PMs) Atal Bihari Vajpayee is remembered for his leadership in shaping India’s engagements with the Southeast Asia. Several path-breaking decisions taken by him laid a solid foundation for Asean-India relations. Two of such initiatives are worth noting.
Riding on the success of the Bharat Jodo Yatra, Rahul Gandhi visited the US recently where he addressed several meetings including a gathering of the Indian community in New York on June 4. Earlier he had addressed a similar gathering of the Indian diaspora in London in March this year. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has just returned from his visit to Australia where he addressed a gathering of the Indian community in Sydney on May 23, and he is slated to be in the US in the last week of June where several programmes involving the Indian community have been planned.
Given Beijing’s constant disregard for the sovereignty and sovereign rights of its regional neighbours, along with its growing disapproval of the established rules-based order, the makings of a new security arrangement seem to have emerged on the sidelines of the Shangri La Forum in Singapore early this month to address these very challenges.
As Gujarat CM, Modi had been a vehement critic of Indo-US nuclear deal, the basis of current shared geopolitical interests between the nations.
Recently, I happened to attend the 6th Indian Ocean conference ,2023 in Dhaka which was organized by the India Foundation in collaboration with Ministry of External Affairs of India and Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Bangladesh among others.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, made it clear recently that the much-awaited counter-offensive of his nation against Russia has begun. With this, the war in Ukraine has entered a new phase: some are anticipating a dangerous escalation while others view this as an opportunity to start a negotiating process to bring some sort of conclusion to the conflict.
For New Delhi, the costs of overdependence on a single nation for defence requirements are obvious with a recalibration likely to produce new defence engagement