French Foreign Minister Jean Yves Le Drian is on three-day trip to India, and it’s a first high-level communication between India and France, since the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. During his visit, the French Foreign Minister has plans to meet top leadership including Prime Minister Narendra Modi. French minister will also hold extensive talks with his counterpart S Jaishankar, Minister of External Affairs of India.
The key focus of discussions between the two ministers and Minister Drian is set to announce France joining the Indo-Pacific Oceans initiative launched by PM Narendra Modi. The French representative may also push Indi-Pacific strategy of European Union. Another priority during the talks will be leveraging the exceptional bilateral relationship, to tackle the main challenges of 2021 such as defending multilateralism with India in UNSC, universal access to vaccine, and boosting global action plan on climate change. Both countries will also discuss joint initiatives that have come to fruition including the new trilateral plan with Australia.
This is coming immediately after the end of the multi-lateral maritime exercise ‘La Perouse’ in which navies of India, France, Japan and the US participated together. India and France has plans to hold bilateral ‘Varuna’ exercise, which involves India and French aircraft carrier exercise at the end of this month. The visiting minister will also be taking forward, the civilian nuclear cooperation and he is expected to make announcements on new joint endeavours during his visit to the ISRO centre in Bengaluru, and also start a dialogue on emerging security challenges in space.
Prakash Javadekar, Minister of Environment will take up climate issue in the meeting while PM Modi will discuss the main regional and international issues including Myanmar, Iran and the peace process in Afghanistan. The discussion will also have some segments around youth mobility and cinema cooperation. The main idea behind such cooperation is that the two countries should strengthen human ties against the backdrop of the pandemic, that has the opposite effect of creating distances, sources said.
The visit of the French Foreign Minister is taking place at a time when the second wave of COVID-19 is at its peak. The sources said the visit is a reflection of how the leadership of France and India stand together in these difficult times, especially after announcing a new phase of cooperation in space security that is focused on the maritime domain to allow defence forces to closely cooperate on mutually agreed operations.
