Rajnath Singh to embark on Cambodia visit to co-chair India-ASEAN defence ministers meet

India's Defence Minister Rajnath Singh is slated to attend the India-ASEAN meet on November 22nd and 23rd. He will be attending the ASEAN defence minister plus meeting and the India-ASEAN defence ministers meeting. The meetings will be held in Siem Reap, Cambodia. 

Rajnath Singh will pay an official visit to Cambodia at the invitation of Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of National Defence of Cambodia Samdech Pichey Sena TEA Banh. Cambodia, as the chair of ASEAN Defence Ministers Plus (ADMM Plus) meeting is hosting the 9th annual meeting at Siem Reap and Singh will address the forum on November 23. He will also call on the Prime Minister of Cambodia. Several initiatives to boost India-ASEAN partnership are planned to be announced during the meeting. It is to mention that India became the dialogue partner of ASEAN in 1992 and the first ASEAN defence minister plus meeting was held in Hanoi, Vietnam, back on October 12, 2010. 

Rajnath Singh will also hold bilateral discussions with Defence Ministers of the participating countries. During the talks, he will discuss defence cooperation matters and ways to further boost the mutually beneficial engagements, as per the official statement.

What is ASEAN?

ASEAN stands for Association of South East Asian Nations, and it was set up in 1967. It is an intergovernmental organisation headquartered in Jakarta, Indonesia. It consists of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. ASEAN has struggled to become a cohesive geopolitical player and member nations have divergent views on which direction ASEAN should go. Most ASEAN members have territory which is claimed by China in the South China sea. Despite China's expansion and coercive activities in the South China Sea, the ASEAN has not adopted a policy which forthrightly opposes China's actions in the region. ASEAN nations have a cumulative population of 662 million and a combined GDP of $3.2 trillion. 

The bloc was originally created in 1967 by Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines and Singapore to stop the spread of communism in the region. This was a period of the Cold War and communism was increasingly becoming appealing to a lot of nations in SouthEast Asia, as they were post colonial nations and communism capitalised on that resentment. As the Cold War came to an end, stability in the region increased and more nations became members of the bloc, such as Vietnam in 1995 and Cambodia in 1999.