India to ink pact with Qatar

In an attempt to give greater depth to her maritime security, India is expected to sign a strategic partnership agreement with Qatar during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s four day visit to Oman and Qatar beginning this Saturday. The agreement ,which will include cooperation in defence and security matters, assumes significance in view of the fact that Qatar will become only the second country in the Gulf region after Oman to have such a pact with India. The agreement with Qatar will include joint exercises, particularly maritime exercises and training of officers.

The Prime Minister will be the first Indian PM to visit Qatar. Last year, then Defence secretary Shekhar Dutt had visited the nation and had identified areas for cooperation, including training of personnel, joint exercises and service-to-service information sharing. This was followed by a high level delegation from Qatar, which visited several defence locations in India and three areas, including vacancies for Qatar’s officers in training courses at higher military education institutions, leasing of artillery firing ranges for practice and training, hiring of firing ranges for mechanised forces, were identified for cooperation.

While Naval officers from Qatar have already been training in India, the signing of the agreement will institutionalise the cooperation and set up annual programmes, official sources said.

India has defence co-operation agreements with US, UK, France, South Africa, Australia, Singapore, Germany and Japan. The PM’s visit to the Middle East is long overdue and is intended to dispel the perception that that India’s foreign policy is skewed towards US.