India wants to build 'solid' ties with ASEAN countries: Ansari

Vice President Hamid Ansari today said India wants to build a "solid" relationship with ASEAN countries and is looking to actively build linkages with them as he arrived here to hold talks with the Laotian leadership to bolster economic engagement as part of the Act East policy.
Ansari flew in here this evening from the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh for a two-day visit, the first by an Indian Vice President to Laos.
The Vice President, who was received at Wattay International Airport by Vongsavath Boupha, Minister to the President's Office, said Laos was a country with whom India has had a good "trouble-free" relationship and it has been in India's consciousness for a very long time.

"We regard the ASEAN grouping and in fact the whole of Southeast Asia as an area in our immediate neighbourhood where as the Prime Minister put it recently Look East Policy is not sufficient it has to be an Act East Policy and as part of that endeavor, we are actively, consciously building our linkages- political linkages, economic linkages, trade linkages above all retaining and reviving cultural linkages which go back a long time," Ansari said at a reception hosted in his honour by Indian envoy to Laos Ravi Shankar Aisola here.
"It is a small country but small countries also have a place under the sun and we in India have been very conscious of it. Apart from our earlier relationship, the more recent relationship which is even more important is the ASEAN grouping," he said at the reception.

Ansari said his trip to the Southeast Asian country should be seen as part of a chain of high-level visits.
"Let nobody get that impression that this has been an area of official amnesia. Prime Ministers have come here, Presidents have come here and therefore please see this visit as part of a chain of high-level visits that we in government undertake consciously, deliberately with certain purpose," he said.