Press Briefings

Briefing by Foreign Secretary on Prime Minister’s visit to Italy to attend G 8/G 5 Summits

06/07/2009

Official Spokesperson (Vishnu Prakash) – Good Evening! As you are aware Prime Minister would be leaving for Italy tomorrow to participate in the G8 and G 5 Summits. Foreign Secretary is here to brief you about PM’s visit. After his opening remarks he would be happy to take a few questions.

I would also like to introduce a colleague, AS (MER) Mr. Yogendra Kumar who is sitting to the right of Foreign Secretary. Sir, the floor is yours.

Foreign Secretary (Shivshankar Menon). Thank you Vishnu. I thought I would brief you on PM’s visit to Italy for the G-8 Outreach meeting and the Stand alone G-5 Summit, which will also be taking place.

As you know, PM will be leaving tomorrow afternoon for Italy. I will give you the programme first. On the 8th, there will be parallel separate meetings of the G-5 leaders and of the G-8. The G 5 leaders will be meeting in the afternoon. G 5, as you know, includes Brazil, China, India, South Africa and Mexico. Mexico is chairing the meeting as the host and there will be a press conference by the five leaders followed by a dinner among themselves.

On the next day on the 9th July, there will be the G-8 / G-5 Outreach meetings. In the morning, the G 8 will meet with all G 5 leaders and Egypt which has also been invited by Italy, as the host. They will be discussing the global issues and development policies and how to take the dialogue forward between the two. As you know in 2007, at the Heiligendamm Summit, they had started a Heiligendamm Dialogue Process between the G 5 and the G 8 countries on a host of issues including protecting innovation, research and innovation, on cross border investment, on energy, and on development particularly in Africa. It was supposed to be a two-year dialogue which has gone through two Summits actually, and now they will report to the leaders and the leaders will decide how to carry forward this dialogue in the future.

At lunch, the leaders will discuss, which again involve G 8 / G 5 and the few other invitees. They will discuss the future sources of growth in the world economy, how to revive the growth in the world economy. And in the afternoon there will be meetings of the Major Economies Forum on energy and climate change in two sessions, and at least one on trade which will see how to fight protectionism, and to move the international trade agenda forward. And then the session of the forum on climate change in the lead up to the Copenhagen Conference in December.

The next day, on July 10th, the G 8 are doing an Outreach with African countries over breakfast which will be followed by a session including the G5 as well and international organizations which would be devoted to food security initially.

There would also be bilateral meetings on the sidelines of these meetings but we will let you know about those as we go along because it is quite a crowded schedule and like last time, I think it is better for me to tell you about as we go through this process.

As you know this will be Prime Minister’s 5th such summit that he is attending. India has been an invitee, as an Outreach partner from 2003 from the Evian Summit in France. In 2004, there was no real Outreach. Thereafter in 2005 at Gleneagles, India was one of the invitees along with the other members of the G-5 and we presented a paper actually on climate change and the international cooperation and energy security. In 2006, at St. Petersburg and the G-5 have been really invited to successive Summits after that - St. Petersburg and Heiligendamm in Germany last year was in Japan (Toyako) and this one is in Italy.

For us it is a useful occasion where some of the leaders of the major economies and our significant partners, get a chance to discuss major global issues in a relatively informal session and get a chance to discuss this with each other. So the issues have varied over time. Obviously, this Summit takes place at a time of the world economic crisis when there is an after effect of financial crisis which is why you saw one of the subjects of recovery, how to promote recovery, where to find sources of future growth, what sort of growth we looking at so and that is going to be one of the big issues.

The other big issue which we think will run through the Summit is also climate change because as we work the way up to Copenhagen in December, this is an issue the international community will need to address. They will get the chance to talk about it. This is not a negotiating forum and this is not an occasion where you try and substitute what is done in the various negotiating forums but it does provide a chance to people to talk to each other frankly and to try and understand each other’s points of view and to see how we can take this forward. And that is really the value of this sort of dialogue at the highest level.

We, from our point of view, it is clearly important that as we look for global solutions to global problems that we work with rest of the international community and in a constructive, positive way and India also assumes her responsibilities internationally and this is why we find it essential and useful to engage in this process and have done so consistently as I said for the last five, this is the fifth Summit in a row actually that we are doing so. I would be happy to take any questions, anything that you want to know about these meetings.

Question: My question is related to the meeting you will hopefully have next week with your Pakistani counterpart. How exactly will the meeting be structured? I know you said only about terrorism but are you expecting the Pakistanis to give you something in writing about what exactly they are doing with regard to the Mumbai investigations?

Foreign Secretary: I think as far as my meeting with my Pakistani counterpart is concerned, it is likely to take place at Sharm-al-sheikh because I think this will be the first location where we will be get a chance to meet. We will do what we have been asked to do by our leaders which is quite clear, Pakistan will tell us what they have done, we will tell them about our concerns and we will then report to our leaders about where we stand on the issues, which for us are quite clear which is bringing the perpetrators of terrorism against India to justice and dismantling the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan which supports these activities. So we will report to our leaders, they will take stock of it. As they have told us they would act at Yekaterinburg and we will see where it goes from there.

Question: My question is about the G-8 Summit. Sir, would India be open to a discussion of the dollar as the global reserve currency and this debate of replacing the dollar with any other instruments like the SDRs.

Foreign Secretary: We are open to discussing all the issues which are relevant to finding a way forward out of the global economic crisis and clearly the issue of imbalances, of what might have caused the imbalances, what enables the world to prevent the future imbalances is one of them, quite apart from what other remedial measures are required to prevent recurrences of financial crisis, many of which have already been agreed in the G-20 format and which are being implemented. But this would be one of the ideas which is already on the table, there have been ideas which have been expressed, we are ready to discuss all of them.

Question: Sir, two questions. One is how many bilateral meetings will be there at G-8 with Dr. Singh and second, today Der Spiegel carried a story that actually G-8 is quite obsolete and they said there are lots of arguments, officially also Germany has said that G-20 is the only relevant thing. What is your comment on this?

Foreign Secretary: About the bilateral as I said, we will tell as we go along. We are fixing, some are fixed, others we are in the process of fixing. It is better, I think that we will tell it to you there itself, all in one go, rather than piecemeal.

But on the other question of relevance of which forum, the G-8, the G-8 plus five, G-20, frankly these are matters of form and for us as India what really matters is which is the forum which is best equipped to actually deliver results. When we will be looking at the financial crisis and the consequences of financial crisis, clearly the G-20 was probably the best place to do that and I think both the Washington Summit and the London Summit they have shown an ability to deal with the financial issues whether it is in terms of restructuring of financial organisations whether it is in terms of strengthening financial regulations, whichever way you look at it, that was the right place. The G-8 plus G-5 Outreach Summits have a different function. They have a much broader discussion and a much more informal discussion of global issues, and issues like, as I said, we have been discussing energy security and climate change in this forum since 2005, since Gleneagles, in fact, we have presented papers on that. Now it is not only just the economic crisis that is an issue for the Summit, in fact one of the major issues is development, what sort of development policies and how we look at the global economy going forward, those are larger issues, broader issues, which I think they will discuss this time as well. Food security, for instance, so I don’t think it is so much a question of saying this one forum is relevant, another forum, the world is more complicated than any single forum, I think, so you need to pick and choose and decide which forum works for the world, I think. But the basic crux of it, from our point of view, as internationalist by conviction that these are global problems. They need global solutions. No single country can fix these kinds of problems - food security, energy security, environment - these are not issues that anyone can do on their own. So you need fora like this, where you have an informal discussion between the leaders where they can actually talk to each other frankly and understand what their interests are and what is possible and what can be done.

Question: Sir, petitions against the release of Hafeez Saeed were dismissed by the Pakistan Supreme Court. Your reactions to that.

Foreign Secretary: I think there are different stories as you can see. I have heard all kinds of stories. I was told petitions were filed at 12 o’ clock, that it was rejected at 2:06. I was told two petitions were filed, one is being rejected, I do not want to comment, frankly, on something that is so unclear. On Friday itself, we heard four different stories of what was actually happening. Once we know, we will let you know.

Question: Sir, two short questions. One is that the Finance Minister announced a Rs. 500 crore package for Sri Lanka. Is the package kind of ready or is it still in the making, have you discussed it with the Sri Lankans and second you mentioned development policy as being the core of the G-8 this time. Do we have yet another paper that we are presenting and your thoughts on the development policy in the current situation?

Foreign Secretary: I did not say it is the core of the G-8 this time, I just said it is one of the big issues; it is part of the broader issues which the G-8 is actually well equipped to discuss and for that part of the discussion in fact it would be a much broader meeting with other countries. We will not be presenting a paper this time, not this time around.

On the Sri Lankan package, on the 500 crores for relief and rehabilitation in Sri Lanka which we provided in the budget today, you know, we have been discussing with the Sri Lankan authority and with the civil society in Sri Lanka also what is required to resettle populations which have been affected by this long-drawn out tragic conflict in Sri Lanka and there are a series of steps that we, as India, have indicated that we would be willing to take that we think we can take. The Sri Lankan Government has assured us at the highest level that it is their goal also to resettle all their internally displaced people those who are in the camps in six months, in 180 days, and we will do what we can do to make that possible to bring people back to their homes in safety back to their original place of habitation with proper livelihood and a proper prospect of living in comforts, some comfort, at least. This would involve a whole series of steps; de-mining to start with, making sure that the paddy fields and their other produce uses the next growing season which is now really over the next few months, so that they have some livelihood to depend on when they go home. That we also provide some shelter in terms of material and so on so, we do have a plan of things that we want to do in these areas to try and help people to go home. We discussed them with the Sri Lankan government in some detail but we will have to keep detailing these and making them more and more details. Some of these materials has actually already been shipped, some of the help is already there, there is a large hospital, ours is in fact one of the few hospitals which is working within the camps itself and we are trying to take care of their medical needs. There is a whole series of needs which we think this 500 crores will be necessary for. So, yes, we do have a plan which will have to be improved as we learn, as we go along, we are working with the Sri Lankan Government, the authorities, with the civil society in Sri Lanka to see that we can carry out this plan and hopefully achieve our goal.

Question: Today’s five hundred crores is in addition to the previous package announced in May?

Foreign Secretary: In May we were speaking of one hundred crores, then PM said five hundred crores. So this implements what the PM had said. It is in the budget.

Question: Will we be sending demining experts to Sri Lanka?

Foreign Secretary: Yes, we will be sending experts from India. We have some expertise in it. More than experts it is also equipment which helps to do this.

Question: Will the experts be from the Army as well?

Foreign Secretary: Possibly. But there are groups outside the Army who have specialized in this.

Question: Just wanted to know if there will be a meeting between PM and US President Barack Obama and what will be the agenda of the meeting?

Foreign Secretary: I am sure they will be meeting but as I said on bilateral meetings we will tell you once we have them all sorted out, we have them fixed and have precise timings and places for them.

Question: An American funded but an Indian company is building a road in Afghanistan near Khost. There appears to be very strong threats. In fact on Friday, there was an attack and though Indians were not killed, six Afghan policemen and an Ukrainian supervisor were killed. Now is anything being done to ensure security as a lot of Indians are working there?

Foreign Secretary: We are working very closely with the Afghan authorities, who as you know, have taken responsibility for security and have actually made great efforts to ensure security of not only of Indian workers but of all workers on this project because this is a project of very high priority for them to which they attach a great deal of importance and we are very grateful to them actually for all that they have done. You mentioned that some of the Afghan personnel have lost their lives. This is not the first time actually, it has happened before as well which gives you an idea of how seriously they take their responsibilities.

Question: Sir, are we offering any help to Afghanistan towards their elections?

Foreign Secretary: Our Election Commission is in touch with their Election Commission and as you know we had helped in the past in their previous Presidential election and also in the parliamentary elections and they have been in touch with each other and in the process of working out details of what sort of things they might require.

Question: Prime Minister was of the opinion that G 8 countries should consult G 5 countries before sorting out the agenda and also said that we are coming here as not petitioners but we are partners? Are they doing it?

Foreign Secretary: True, very true, still true. Let me tell you, it is a process of evolution. To begin with, perhaps yes, there was a tendency for the G-8 to issue declaration before they had even met to G-5. This time, for the first time ever, there is likely to be a joint G-8 plus G 5 declaration which I think answers your question.

Question: Just in addition to earlier question, the discussion with your Pakistani counterpart, is it going to discuss terror in general? Taking stock is it specifically about Kabul and Mumbai?

Foreign Secretary: I think it is clear. For us it is not one incident or the other. It is the fact there is terrorism coming out of Pakistan which affects us. And that is the fact. And that is exactly how we have defined it consistently. You must have seen at Yekaterinburg when we spoke about and thereafter and that is really the issue. This is the issue which has bothered us for many years. That is why we raised it before, that is why there are assurances on record from Pakistan about not permitting the use of its territory for terrorism against Indian in any manner and that is really we will discuss.