PM Modi’s France visit unprecedented, says Foreign Secretary

"It's a great camaraderie between President Emmanuel Macron and the Prime Minister, which you could easily sense from the visuals you would have seen."

New Delhi: Foreign Secretary Vinay Kwatra on Friday said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s two-day visit to France has been “unprecedented and highly successful”.

Addressing a press briefing in Paris on the culmination of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi‘s visit, Kwatra said: “It’s a great camaraderie between President Emmanuel Macron and the Prime Minister, which you could easily sense from the visuals you would have seen.”

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The Foreign Secretary said that the French Prime Minister welcomed Modi at the airport. “This is not a very common thing that you will see. PM Modi conferred with the country’s highest honour, the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour. I am told PM Modi is the first Indian after Independence to receive the Legion of Honour,” Kwatra said.

On the issue of the Russia-Ukraine war, the Foreign Secretary said: “In today’s discussions between the two leaders, there was a very clear understanding and appreciation of each other’s position on the Russia-Ukraine conflict.”

Kwatra further said that Prime Minister Modi has been perhaps the strongest advocate of resolving the Russia-Ukraine conflict through dialogue and diplomacy. “So when the two leaders meet, like they met earlier today and yesterday, they also discussed at length the current status of the Russia-Ukraine conflict…”

He added that both the leaders also discussed the impact of this conflict on the developing countries, the challenges, the exacerbating challenges of food security, the growing uncertainty that it creates for energy security, and the rapid increase in fertilizer security challenges which can translate into food security challenges tomorrow.

On the agreement between India and France to facilitate usage of India’s unified payments interface (UPI), the Foreign Secretary said: “UPI has arrived at an understanding, through which the interface between the UPI-based payments model and the French ecosystem of payments modalities will be able to talk to each other technically… technologically and be able to affect those payments… the large extensive tested out digital public infrastructure model that India brings to the table is of huge value proposition.”