The Hindu : Vajpayee to visit Cambodia, Singapore as scheduled

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Mar 29, 2002

International

International

Vajpayee to visit Cambodia, Singapore as scheduled

By Amit Baruah

SINGAPORE March 28. "No, you must come." That's what the Cambodian Foreign Minister, Hor Namhong, said to the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, earlier this month in New Delhi after Phnom Penh was told that he could not visit Cambodia from April 9 onwards.

The Prime Minister consented. With the situation in Gujarat apparently easing and the Cambodians insisting that he go ahead with the visit, Mr. Vajpayee said that he would, on the dates agreed to earlier.

The Singaporeans were then asked whether it would be convenient if Mr. Vajpayee stuck to his earlier schedule — of touring the island nation from April 7 to 9. They said yes.

As a consequence, the tour that was off is now on. Given the hectic engagement with South-East Asia, the Prime Minister's earlier decision to cancel the visit didn't send out the right signals.

It is a region to which there have been frequent travels in the last two years. With Mr. Namhong carrying a formal invitation to the first-ever ASEAN-India summit scheduled for November in Phnom Penh, the Prime Minister possibly would have found it difficult to say no.

Given the fact that the periodicity and content of the ASEAN-India summit is still an open issue, the Cambodian role in determining the course of the summit meeting will be important. At a meeting between senior ASEAN and Indian officials earlier this week in Kuala Lumpur, New Delhi signalled that South-East Asia was an important region for India. (The meeting took place in Kuala Lumpur since Malaysia is the country coordinator for India in ASEAN).

For their part, several Foreign Ministry officials told their Indian counterparts that they were extremely upbeat about the summit interaction, which was announced at the ASEAN summit in Brunei in November 2001. They said an ASEAN-India summit was necessary and would lead to a balance in the relationship between ASEAN and the other big three in Asia — China, Japan and South Korea — all of them major economic powerhouses.

The possibility of more business contacts was stressed by the Indian side, with a top FICCI official, Amit Mitra, giving a presentation to the ASEAN senior officials on the Indian economy. It would appear that the decision on whether the ASEAN-India summit would be held once a year or once in two years would be taken when the Heads of Government gather in Phnom Penh in November.

It is also clear that the "use value'' of the summit to both India and ASEAN would be contained in all-round growth in economic ties between the two entities. Since the one achievement of the ASEAN summit in Brunei was the decision to forge an ASEAN-China free trade area (FTA) in the next 10 years, it is evident that India, too, must be sufficiently attractive in economic terms to South-East Asia. Interestingly, both Singapore and Cambodia have been at the forefront of convincing other ASEAN members that the idea of a summit meeting with India was a good one.

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