Indian PM to Hold Talks With Visiting Burmese Foreign Minister

Text of report by Ramesh Ramachandran headlined “Red carpet for Burma minister” published by Indian newspaper The Asian Age website on 2 January

New Delhi, 1 January: New Delhi will look to make progress on the 100m dollar Kaladan multi-modal transport project and cement its bilateral ties with Burma when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Minister of External Affairs Pranab Mukherjee hold talks with visiting Burmese minister of Foreign Affairs U. Nyan Win on Wednesday [2 January].

Mr Win arrived in New Delhi on Monday for a five-day visit. His official engagements will include a call on Vice President Hamid Ansari on Wednesday evening.

Mr Win’s visit comes three weeks after India and Burma concluded foreign office consultations in New Delhi.

Burmese Deputy Minister in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Kyaw Thu was here on 11 December for delegation-level talks with Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon. Wednesday’s meeting between Mr Win and Mr Mukherjee will be the second in three months. They had met on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on 1 October 2007. Incidentally, a day later, on 2 October 2007, India chose to vote against a resolution in the UN Human Rights Council criticising Burma for human rights violations.

On another occasion, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Burmese Prime Minister Lieutenant-General Thein Sein met for the first time in Singapore on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in November 2007. In December 2007, India was invited to the informal 14-nation Group of Friends of the Secretary-General on Burma. This group met for the first time in New York on 21 December 2007.

The Kaladan multi-modal project entails construction of roads and waterways to give the land-locked north-eastern Indian states, access to the Bay of Bengal via Burma. India would have liked a transit route through Bangladesh but Dhaka’s reluctance for providing transit facilities to Indian goods through Chittagong port compelled India to turn to Burma.

Originally published by The Asian Age website, Delhi, in English 02 Jan 08.

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