KABUL (SW): Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi landed in Kabul early Friday for the much anticipated visit while his office has labelled Modi’s engagements in Afghanistan as ‘meeting with friends'.<\/p>\n
During his visit today, the Prime Minister unveiled two of India’s most important initiatives in Afghanistan during the short visit: the inauguration of the parliament building, and handing over ceremony for four Mi-25 attack helicopters.<\/p>\n
The parliament building has been marked as “a symbol of India’s support to Afghanistan’s democracy and civil reconstruction support”. The helicopters are an equally symbolic gesture, as they denote a shift in India’s position on supplying ‘offensive’ equipment, the Hindustan Times noted.<\/p>\n
Three of the helicopters have already reached Kabul, while the last is expected to be dispatched in the next few days.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Modi was received at red carpet by the Afghan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani at the “Arg” the presidential palace. Later, PM Modi will address a joint session of the two Afghan Houses in the new Parliament building along with President Ghani.<\/p>\n
The building will house the Wolesi Jirga (Lower House) with a seating capacity of 294, a 190-seat Meshrano Jirga (Upper House), besides other facilities like a conference hall and a press room.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
ENDS<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
KABUL (SW): Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi landed in Kabul early Friday for the much anticipated visit while his office has labelled Modi\u2019s engagements in Afghanistan as \u2018meeting with friends .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":81107,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79],"tags":[93],"class_list":["post-81106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","tag-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81106\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}