The national security advisors of India and Russia held a comprehensive session on several issues including the Afghan topic amid the US troop withdrawal and the role of the Taliban in the future, on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s (SCO) NSA-led meeting.
Other topics discussed were enhancing security & counter-terror cooperation, a partnership between security agencies and the Indo-Pacific region. The meeting continued for over two-hour between India’s Ajit Doval and his Russian counterpart, Nikolay Patrushev, in Tajikistan’s capital Dushanbe.
Patrushev and Doval discussed in detail further plans of the Russia-India interaction in the security sphere, cooperation among the security and law enforcement agencies, a Russian government statement said.
India has been keen to engage Russia in the Indo-Pacific region through investments in the Russian Far East and a trilateral also involving Japan. The revival of the Chennai-Vladivostok shipping route hopes to give further momentum to the Indo-Pacific partnership.
NSA Doval in the presence of the Pakistani NSA proposed an action plan against LeT and JeM as part of the SCO framework, and empasised adoption of international standards to counter terror financing including a memorandum of understanding between the SCO and the Financial Action Task Force.
