“Laos PM said his country supported India as a permanent member of a reformed and expanded UNSC”, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup informed the media after a bilateral meeting between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Sisoulith on Thursday morning.
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This could well be the last bilateral meeting between Modi and Obama before the latter demits office in January next year.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi emplaned for Delhi from Laos’ capital Vientiane after attending the two-day 14th ASEAN Summit.
The US earlier said it is in constant “conversation” with the Pakistani leadership on the threats posed by terror organisations like the Haqqani network and LeT operating in the region. They had met on the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington in April.
The two leaders also discussed cooperation in areas such as dairy farming, animal husbandry and agriculture.
Japan’s maritime self-defence force and the Indian and USA navies conducted Malabar joint maritime security exercises in June and Japanese and Indian defence ministers agreed in July to repeat the joint drill next year.
“If we can make all this progress, then we can look forward to the next chapter in Asean-India relations, with deeper engagement and more robust cooperation”, he said.
China is involved in disputes with littoral countries of the region over the South China Sea particularly over the Spratly and Paracel groups of islands.
The Summits will be attended by Heads of State/Government of the 10 ASEAN and 18 East Asia Summit Participating Countries respectively.
He added that India supports freedom of navigation based on United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
“We, as BRICS are an influential voice in global discourse”.
During the meeting, Obama also praised Modi’s vision of entrepreneurship and innovation, which he said would be “very important for a country like India”.
“There is one country in India’s neighbourhood”, he said, “whose competitive advantage rests exclusively in producing and exporting terrorism”.
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The PM’s comments come just days after he told the G20 summit in China that Pakistan is “a single nation spreading agents of terror”.
