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India, Russia, China to hold meet in New York

By Amit Baruah

FRANKFURT Sept. 9. The Indian, Chinese and Russian Foreign Ministers will hold their first-ever trilateral meeting on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York.

Senior Indian officials told presspersons on board the Prime Minister's special flight from New Delhi to Frankfurt today, that the meeting is to take place either on September 18 or 19.

They said the latest initiative was a Russian initiative and India had gone along with Moscow's move. For its part, India doesn't believe that there would be substantive discussions at this meeting. "If they agree to meet again that will be an achievement,'' the officials said.

The then Russian Prime Minister, Yevgeny Primakov, some years ago had raised the issue of trilateral cooperation .

India had been relatively lukewarm to the proposal, but now believes that there is no harm in going ahead with the meeting, which comes at a time when there seems to have been "some cooling'' off in India-U.S. relations. The officials were, however, quick to point out that India was keen on developing close relations with different countries and New Delhi was going ahead on this path.

In this context, the Foreign Secretary, Kanwal Sibal, was recently in Moscow for consultations before joining the External Affairs Minister, Yashwant Sinha, now on his first-ever visit to Washington. In a separate development, M.J. Akbar and Dileep Padgaonkar, both members of the Kashmir Committee, spent over an hour with the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, on the special aircraft briefing him on the deliberations of the panel.

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