India and Mexico have agreed to hold an important conference on regional and global disarmament.
The meeting would be headed by the Joint Secretary of the disarmament division of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) from the Indian side. It was taken up during the seventh meeting of the Mexico-India Joint Commission (JCM) and the fourth round of Foreign Office Consultations held on June 23 in Mexico City.
“Both sides expressed their continued commitment to strengthen global non-proliferation efforts,” said a statement issued by the Embassy of Mexico after multilateral consultations, co-chaired by Secretary (East) of the MEA Preeti Saran and Ambassador Miguel Ruiz Cabanas.
India and Mexico have been in consultation on India’s bid for the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) membership.
NSG bid
President Enrique Pena Nieto had declared Mexico’s support for India’s entry to the Group during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s June 2016 visit to the country.
The special disarmament meeting is likely to build on the time-tested India-Mexico collaboration on disarmament starting from the 1980s when both countries led the Group of Six, an anti-proliferation group of six countries that tried to contain cold war nuclear rivalry between the U.S. and the USSR.
The latest consultations are aimed at upgrading the Privileged Partnership formed in 2007 to a strategic level as agreed upon during Modi-Nieto meeting of 2016.
