Indian minister reveals meeting details with President Sisi

CAIRO – 22 October 2017: "Egypt has always played a very important, even critical, role in shaping the Middle East. It is one of the countries which make the difference," the Indian Minister of State for External Affairs M. J. Akbar told Press Trust of India news agency on Sunday.

Akbar attended the ceremony held on Saturday on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Alamein Battle in Egypt. Akbar delivered to President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi gratitude on behalf of the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for Egypt’s support to the Indian candidate, Justice Bhandari, for a second term to a seat on the International Court of Justice.

Bhandari was first elected in 2012 and his term will end in February 2018. If he is reelected for a second term, he would serve for nine years in the post. On the other hand, India had supported Egyptian candidate to UNESCO’s Director-General position, Ambassador Moushira Khattab.

The Indian minister affirmed that President Sisi is very eager to take Egyptian-Indian ties to a much higher level; boosting bilateral relations “not simply on government-to-government level but (also improving) partnership on a people-to-people level.”

Akbar described his meeting with the Egyptian president as “excellent.” "It was also an occasion to reassert what our prime minister has been saying about terrorism, and the message he is giving is 'There is no good terrorism, no bad terrorism. All terrorism is evil' and President Sisi endorsed that completely," the minister added.

Akbar laid a wreath at the cemetery of the Indian soldiers who participated in the Alamein Battle, which took place in 1942, during World War II between the Allies and the Axis powers, when Egypt was still under British occupation.

The decisive battle between the forces of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's and the Afrika Korps of Germany's Erwin Rommel resulted in halting the advance of the Axis in North Africa and paving the way for the final victory there the following year.