External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar held wide-ranging discussions on Friday with French counterpart Jean-Noël Barrot and both sides agreed to intensify bilateral cooperation in areas such as defence, security, space, and civilian-nuclear collaboration.

Jaishankar expressed India’s deep appreciation to France for its strong condemnation of the cross-border terrorist attack in Pahalgam and thanked Paris for its steadfast support for India’s right to defend itself against terrorism.

He addressed a joint press conference in Marseille after the meeting and underlined that there had been a very high degree of trust between India and France over the years, as one looked at their relationship and cooperation. He said both sides also discussed global and regional issues like the situation in the Indian subcontinent, the Ukraine conflict, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific.

He said that India had always maintained that this was not an era where differences should be settled through war and that dialogue and diplomacy remained the answer, because no solutions were going to come out of the battlefield.

Jaishankar said both sides held wide-ranging discussions that covered defence, civilian nuclear energy, space, counterterrorism, people-to-people relations, innovation, AI, and technology.

He said they spent a little while discussing how education, research, business, and mobility could add new ways of adding more substance to their relationship.

He said they agreed to intensify cooperation in defence, security, space, and civilian nuclear areas through very concrete measures and projects in the time to come.

Jaishankar said his conversations with Barrot also covered the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEEC), their triangular development cooperation, and how they could take forward some of their trilateral mechanisms, including one with the UAE and one with Australia.