PM warms up to neighbours ahead of UN meet

Government sources said the PM is keen to meet Pakistan PM Yousuf Raza Gilani. The details of the meeting are still being discussed at official level. Singh will be in New York from September 22-26. Shishir Gupta reports.

Updated on: Sep 13, 2011, 24:33:42 IST

Hindustan Times | By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

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Keeping the foreign policy focus firmly on South Asia after the Dhaka initiative, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is scheduled to meet Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa and newly appointed Nepal prime minister Baburam Bhattarai on the sidelines of his four-day visit to attend the UN General Assembly this month.

Government sources said the PM is also keen to meet Pakistan prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani. The details of the meeting are still being discussed at official level. Singh will be in New York from September 22-26.

The much -awaited meeting between Singh and US president Barack Obama may not take place as of now as the dates of the two leaders do not coincide as the latter is scheduled to leave New York before Manmohan Singh lands for the UNGA.

However, officials say that the two leaders will meet in case their visits to New York coincide due to last-minute changes of US president's travel plans.

Official sources said the meeting with Bhattarai, who assumed office on August 29, 2011, in the US will be followed by a state level bilateral visit by the veteran Maoist leader to India on his return from the UNGA.

The dates of the meeting at the UNGA and Bhattarai's first bilateral visit to India on his return are being in the process of being finalised. Singh's meeting with Rajapaksa will focus on strengthening economic cooperation.

The meeting with Rajapaksa will be followed by a visit of Sushma Swaraj, Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, to Sri Lanka on October 3.

The visit is at the invitation of Colombo.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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