While Narendra Modi spent fewer days abroad than his predecessor -- 275 days versus Dr Singh's 306 - he has travelled more widely than any other Indian PM.
India is increasingly a willing participant in the evolving US' Indo-Pacific strategy. While these developments are related to the perception of a growing Chinese security challenge, their implications for India's much-vaunted strategic autonomy should be a matter of deeper and closer reflection, asserts former foreign secretary Shyam Saran.
Without mentioning the boundary dispute, the spokesperson said that China-India relations have been stable on the whole and "our two sides have maintained dialogue and communication at various levels".
Modi hailed the close defence cooperation between the two countries and welcomed the completion of the logistics agreement between the two navies.
This is possibly the first time Hasina's daughter will be by her mother's side during an official visit to close neighbour and ally India, and analysts believe this to be significant in many ways.
A joint statement was issued by US Secretary of State Tony Blinken, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, and Japanese Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa after their in-person meeting in Phnom Penh on the margins of the 55th ASEAN Foreign Ministers' Meeting.
It will be Putin's first participation in a multilateral summit after a mercenary group launched a short-lived armed rebellion last week that rocked Moscow.
Indian policymakers are almost alone, alongside the United States, in seeking a hard and multi-sectoral global decoupling from China in the expectation that it will boost their economies, observes Mihir S Sharma.
'The group commands 85 per cent of the global GDP, and if you are able to convey your point of view effectively to this group then you have reached more or less all the important players that matter.'
'No Cold War should be reignited and no Ukraine-style crisis should be repeated in Asia'
Jaishankar, who arrived in Santo Domingo on his first official visit to the Dominican Republic, also said that India has seen a dramatic expansion in connectivity, contacts, and cooperation across the region.
Sources said China was forcefully pushing for inking the deal during the RCEP summit later in the day, which was seen as an attempt to counter-balance the impact of its lingering trade war with the US as well as to project the region's economic might to the West.
Prime Minister Modi on Saturday left for Egypt after concluding his state visit during which he held wide-ranging talks with President Joe Biden and addressed the joint session of the US Congress.
Countries that have signed the RCEP agreement can start negotiations with India for joining the pact once New Delhi submits a written request stating its intention for the same, according to a declaration. On November 4 last year, India walked out of mega free trade agreement RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) as negotiations failed to address New Delhi's outstanding issues and concerns. The remaining 15 member countries have signed RCEP agreement and have stated that the pact would remain open to India.
The leaders of the Quad comprising India, the United States, Australia and Japan are set to demonstrate that the grouping is a 'force for global good' and has a unifying commitment to a rules-based international order amid China's increasingly intimidatory behaviour.
Modi will have a number of high-profile multilateral and bilateral meetings with global leaders including United States Vice President Mike Pence and Singapore premier Lee Hsein Loong.
During 2013-14, imports from Japan, South Korea and Malaysia stood at $9.49 billion, $12.47 billion and $9.21 billion respectively.
The South Asian nations could script a new history of cooperation and prosperity that could serve as an example for other nations, notes Dr Rahul Mishra.
In 2013, India was Singapore's 11th largest trading partner and 12th largest export destination, with total trade volume of 25.5 billion Singaporean dollars ($ 20.36 billion).
There were concerns in Sri Lanka about the huge trade imbalance.
The Modi government has to embrace the history of Tamil conquests in South East Asia and stop obsessing about Babar/Humayun, argues Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
According to the industry body, the 16-member RCEP has the potential to become one of the largest and economically dynamic trading blocs of the world, even bigger than the European Union.
India has been forcefully raising the issue of market access as well as protected lists of goods mainly to shield its domestic market as there have been fears that the country may be flooded with cheap Chinese agricultural and industrial products once it signs the deal.
'There's no pro-China tilt in BRICS.' 'All these countries want to be close to China, but they are all good friends of India also.'
The PM held bilateral meetings with three ASEAN leaders, including his Vietnamese counterpart Nguyen Xuan Phuc and Myanmar's State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, and discussed key bilateral and regional issues.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday embarked on a four-day visit to Indonesia and Singapore with an aim of bolstering partnership with East Asia at a time when the United States and Europe are going through economic crisis.
Modi said India will continue its support to ASEAN for a rules-based security architecture for the region.
The agenda prepared by ministers will be discussed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other RCEP leaders in Nonthaburi, a city north of Bangkok, on November 4, the official deadline to close talks.
The prime minister will have a tight schedule in the Philippines as besides attending the 15th ASEAN-India summit and 12th East Asia summit on November 14, he will have a series of other engagements including bilateral meetings with several leaders.
Asia's richest man Gautam Adani, besides looking at opportunities to expand his vast empire, is hooked on ChatGPT - the programme that trawls vast amount of information to generate natural-sounding text on virtually anything - from crafting jokes to writing ad copy, debugging computer code, to even generating poems and essays. Adani, whose conglomerate has in recent years diversified from mines, ports and power plants into airports, data centres and defence, penned musing from his visit to Davos to attend the World Economic Forum meeting. "From a meetings perspective, this was perhaps my busiest WEF as I met over a dozen heads of states and several business leaders," he wrote on LinkedIn, talking of new geopolitical couplings, climate change and tight-lipped evangelists and AI.
The prime minister was speaking at an event to mark golden jubilee of the Aditya Birla Group's presence in Thailand.
India-Maldives ties came under strain under Yameen who was perceived to be close to China.
Existing trade deals, especially the 2009 pact with the Asean bloc, have been panned by the Centre for not boosting exports but flooding the domestic market with cheap imports. Subsequently, New Delhi has called for reviewing FTAs with Japan and South Korea. Going by that, a trade deal with the US is unlikely to be beneficial, say experts.
Trade between India and Indonesia stands at $20 billion.
Among the current FTAs with significant trade deficits for India, five are with countries from the 10-nation Asean bloc. Exports to the 10 economies stood at $ 37.4 billion in 2018-19, up by 9% year on year. On the other hand, imports were higher at $ 59.31 billion, up by 25% from the previous year's $ 47.13 billion.
'It seems a wiser decision to pull out at the right moment than regret after joining the pact,' explains Dr Rahul Mishra.
Expressing concern over the Russia-Ukraine conflict, India and Australia have underlined the need for an immediate cessation of hostilities and stressed that the contemporary global order has been built on UN Charter, international law and respect for States' sovereignty and territorial integrity.
India on Friday said the Nawaz Sharif government in Pakistan has given 'good signals" in normalising bilateral ties but cautioned against expecting "magic overnight".
No lives were lost after cyclone Biparjoy made landfall. Preparations for Biparjoy were not only extensive, they were also telecast far and wide. Ahead of the cyclone's landfall, Shyam G Menon observes there was considerable publicity on how much the government was geared up to face the storm and its aftermath.
In his opening remarks at a ministerial meeting in Tokyo of the Quadrilateral coalition, also known as 'Quad', External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said India remained committed to a rules-based world order, respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, and peaceful resolution of disputes.
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