He is the first Indian Prime Minister to visit Laos after Jawaharlal Nehru in 1954, and A.B. Vajpayee underlined the significance of his presence in the Southeast Asian nation today by offering it a $10 million credit line at very low interest rates. And to further cement relations with Laos, which is slated to play a key role in the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), Vajpayee also thanked it for its $50,000-donation to the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund after the January 2001 Gujarat earthquake. ‘‘Your country may be small but your heart is very big,’’ he told Lao Prime Minister Bounnhang Vorachit in the capital Vientiane.Vajpayee’s Laos visit forms the second leg of his three-nation tour of Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. Laos is all set for big things in the ASEAN: it will be the country coordinator for India’s dialogue with ASEAN from July 2003, a role which rests with Malaysia at present. Laos will also host the ASEAN Summit in 2004.India today also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Laos in the field of defence cooperation. Currently, Indian defence forces—mainly the Army—train cadets at defence academies in Laos. It was also agreed that Laos would waive visa fees for diplomatic and official Indian passports. And that narco-terrorism and drug trafficking in the ASEAN region would be combated. In return, Laos promised to support India’s candidature for a permanent seat at the UN Security Council.R M Abhayankar, a Ministry of External Affairs official, told mediapersons that the meeting between Vajpayee and Vorachit was aimed at ‘‘rekindling an old relationship’’. It was suggested that the line of credit could be used to build a transmission line to export surplus power from Laos to Cambodia or to set up a speciality hospital. The option of using the credit line to upgrade the airport in Vientiane or to set up an information technology centre was also discussed.Officials from the National Informatics Centre will visit Laos in the near future to explore the possibilities of setting up an IT centre here. India also presented Laos with 14 computers and some parachutes.
