President wraps up Vietnam visit, flies home

President Pranab Mukherjee Wednesday wrapped up his four-day state visit to Vietnam and flew back to India.

During the visit that took President Mukherjee to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, India and Vietnam called for a peaceful, unfettered South China Sea, and inked seven agreements including for direct Delhi-Hanoi flights and an extended line of credit for purchase of military equipment.

Both countries also set a target of $15 billion bilateral trade by 2020.

Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung is set to visit India in October at the head of a large business delegation to explore further opportunities for economic cooperation.

A joint communique following the talks said President Mukherjee and his Vietnamese counterpart Truong Tan Sang agreed to strengthen and deepen bilateral cooperation on the basis of the strategic partnership.

The focus would be on political, defence and security cooperation, economic cooperation, science and technology, culture and people-to-people links, technical cooperation and multilateral and regional cooperation.

The leaders agreed that military and security cooperation was an important pillar of the strategic partnership between the two countries, and expressed satisfaction with the ongoing cooperation in this field.

They noted that the signing of the MoU for a Line of Credit of $100 million for defence procurement extended by India to Vietnam would open new avenues for cooperation.

(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)