'India-France bilateral relationship striving and growing'

Evian (France), June 16 (IANS) The French Foreign Ministry on Tuesday said that the bilateral relationship between India and France is striving and growing.

Pascal Confavreux, Spokesperson for the French Foreign Ministry, spoke with IANS on the sidelines of the ongoing G7 Summit in Evian, noting that the participation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Summit is ‘extremely important’ and the visit of PM Modi to France, which started on Sunday, shows the development of the relationship between the two nations.

“It's extremely important that Prime Minister Modi is taking part in this G7. You have a bilateral relation which is striving and growing. This visit shows it because it started as early as Sunday with a whole day spent together between President Macron and Prime Minister Modi in the south of France, in Nice, a city that the Indians know very well,” Confavreux told IANS.

He noted that at the G7 leaders' meeting, Prime Minister Modi is taking part in the discussion addressing the global economic imbalances.

And then after the G7 leaders' meeting, he will be part of the VivaTech Summit.

“Different parts of the tech happening in Paris, where you have CEOs of the whole world gathering, and taking place with all the innovations at present. So this shows actually the strength of the bilateral relations and also all the future that you can imagine between these two relations, both in innovation, culture, economy, and also in military and defence,” the spokesperson highlighted.

He also commented on the Iran-US MoU, which was announced earlier.

“It's something that we welcome because we've been calling for this deal for now, a couple of weeks. It's important because we need the Strait of Hormuz to open as soon as possible for our economies, of course, and also to address the core root of the situation, which is the nuclear program of Iran, but also it's a ballistic missile program, and it's proxies in the region,” Confavreux noted.

“We stand ready to take all our responsibilities so that we can engage in these discussions. In the short term, we are also ready to deploy a multinational mission to help reestablish the trust, which is necessary to have the reestablishment of the fluidity of the traffic in the Strait of Hormuz,” he added.

–IANS

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