Clearly setting the neighbourhood as a foreign policy priority, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will undertake his first overseas trip to Bhutan later this month.
An official team from the Ministry of External Affairs will leave for Thimphu on Friday to work out the modalities of the visit. The visit is proposed after the ongoing Parliament session that ends on June 11.
The decision was taken after Modi outlined that he would begin his visits from the neighbourhood, both as an outreach and as a matter of foreign policy priority, official sources said.
Bhutan was chosen as the destination for the PM’s first foreign visit as it happens to be among India’s friendliest neighbours and enjoys a close inter-dependent foreign policy and economic relationship. Bhutan’s economy is closely linked with India and Thimphu has resisted pressure from countries like China to take any policy decision inimical to Indian interest. China has been making sustained efforts to open a mission there.
India and Bhutan have put in place various mechanisms, dialogue and coordination on various issues including on foreign policy. Modi’s visit is likely to send a signal of strong support to the Bhutanese monarchy’s efforts at ushering in democracy in the Himalayan nation, sources pointed out. Before finalising Thimphu as the PM’s first foreign visit, the relations between Bhutan, Nepal and Bangladesh besides Afghanistan were discussed by the establishment here.
Nepal was also a priority destination but Kathmandu will be hosting a SAARC summit later this year providing an opportunity to Modi to visit the Himalayan country. No PM has visited Nepal for nearly 13 years and the last bilateral visit was in the late eighties.
Bangladesh as a choice was withheld as the Government is yet to prioritise its stand on crucial agreements like the land boundary settlement, to which the BJP has been opposed in the past.
Meanwhile, India has agreed to impart training to sniffer dogs for the Royal Bhutan Police as a goodwill gesture.
The Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) will impart training to five sniffer dogs for the Bhutanese Police at its state-of-the-art canine training centre. The decision to train the sniffer and tracker dogs comes as a goodwill gesture upon a request from that country’s authorities.
The dog which will be trained to aid police personnel in counter-narcotics and anti-sabotage tasks in Bhutan, will be drawn from the local labrador and German Shepherd breeds and they will form the first elite squad of sniffer dogs for the Royal Bhutan Police trained for specific tasks, an ITBP official said.