Union minister Rajnath Singh will be on a two-day visit to Indonesia on November 16 and 17 to participate in the 10th ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting-Plus (ADMM-Plus) in Jakarta. The Defence Minister will address the forum on regional and international security issues during the meeting which will be hosted by Indonesia as the chair of ADMM-Plus.
Singh will also hold bilateral talks with Defence Ministers of the participating nations on the sidelines of the meeting and discuss defence cooperation matters to further strengthen mutually-beneficial engagements, stated the press release by the Ministry of Defence on Monday.
The ADMM is the highest defence consultative and cooperative mechanism of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its eight Dialogue Partners to strengthen security and defence cooperation.
The ASEAN bloc comprises 10 southeast Asian countries namely, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam and the eight Dialogue Partners include India, US, China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
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India was included as the ASEAN’s dialogue partner in 1992 and the inaugural ADMM-Plus was convened in Hanoi, Vietnam on October 12, 2010.
The ADMM-Plus Ministers have been meeting since 2017 ever year to bolster the cooperation amongst the ASEAN and the Plus countries.
“The ADMM-Plus progresses practical cooperation amongst member countries through seven Experts Working Groups (EWGs) namely Maritime Security, Military Medicine, Cyber Security, Peacekeeping Operations, Counter Terrorism, Humanitarian Mine Action and Humanitarian Assistance & Disaster Relief (HADR),” said the defence ministry in its statement.
During the 10th ADMM-Plus, the next set of co-chairs for the cycle 2024-2027 would also be announced. In the present cycle from 2021-2024, India is co-chairing EWG on HADR along with Indonesia, it added.