Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate the 6th edition of the Raisina Dialogue today. President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame and Prime Minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen will also join the Inaugural Session as chief guests.
The dialogue will be held virtually from April 13 to 16, 2021. The Raisina Dialogue is India’s flagship conference on geopolitics and geo-economics, held annually since 2016. It is jointly organised by the Ministry of External Affairs and the Observer Research Foundation.
The Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, will also participate in the conference, in one of the subsequent sessions.
Due to the exceptional circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, the organisers have decided to hold the dialogue virtually.
“Prime Minister of India will inaugurate the Dialogue through a video message on 13 April.
The theme for the 2021 Edition is “ViralWorld: Outbreaks, Outliers and Out of Control”.
Over the course of four days, the Dialogue, will have panel conversations on five thematic pillars – WHOse Multilateralism? Reconstructing the UN and Beyond; Securing and Diversifying Supply Chains; Global ‘Public Bads’: Holding Actors and Nations to Account; Infodemic: Navigating a ‘No-Truth’ World in the Age of Big Brother; The Green Stimulus: Investing in Gender, Growth, and Development,” the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said in a statement.
The event will also see the presence of Carl Bildt, Former Prime Minister of Sweden; Anthony Abbott, Former Prime Minister of Australia, and Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand. The Foreign Ministers of Portugal, Slovenia, Romania, Singapore, Nigeria, Japan, Italy, Sweden, Australia, Kenya, Chile, Maldives, Iran, Qatar, and Bhutan will also participate.
The 2021 edition will have 50 sessions with the participation of 150 speakers from 50 countries and multilateral organisations. More than 2000 attendees have pre-registered from over 80 countries and a large number of participants are likely to join the Dialogue through various social media platforms.
In the past six years, the Raisina Dialogue has grown in stature and profile to emerge as a leading global conference on international affairs, the ministry said. “It attracts leading minds from the global strategic and policy-making community to discuss broader foreign policy and strategic issues facing the world,” the statement added.
