India Hosts First BIMSTEC Home Ministers Meeting in Delhi

The correct answer is the Delhi Declaration. The first meeting of BIMSTEC Home Ministers, hosted by India in New Delhi and chaired by Union Home and Cooperation Minister Amit Shah, adopted this declaration, which lays down the principles behind security cooperation in the grouping. It presses for joint work against cross border terrorism, terror financing, radicalisation, drug trafficking, human trafficking, cybercrime and organised crime, and it gives priority to information sharing, mutual legal assistance, extradition and capacity building. Option A is wrong because Bangkok was the venue of the sixth BIMSTEC Summit of 4 April 2025, where the Prime Minister proposed a disaster management centre, and no document of that name came out of this meeting. Option C is wrong because the grouping did not adopt any charter here; what it cleared were a convention against human trafficking and four action plans and a memorandum of understanding. Option D is wrong because Jamnagar in Gujarat is the proposed site of the BIMSTEC Disaster Management Centre and not the name of any agreement signed at the meeting.

The correct answer is Gujarat. At the first BIMSTEC Home Ministers Meeting the Union Home Minister said the proposed BIMSTEC Disaster Management Centre is planned at Jamnagar, which lies in Gujarat, and he asked member countries to take an active part in making the centre work. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had offered the centre at the sixth BIMSTEC Summit held in Bangkok on 4 April 2025, and the Home Minister described disaster management cooperation as a top priority for the region, with India acting as a first responder. Options A, B and D name Odisha, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, which are all states on the Bay of Bengal coast and so look plausible for a regional disaster centre, but none of them was named for this facility. The meeting separately approved an action plan to improve preparedness and coordination against natural disasters in the Bay of Bengal region, covering joint exercises, early warning, disaster mapping, training centres and tsunami risk reduction.

The correct answer is seven. Delegations of all member countries of BIMSTEC, namely Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand, attended the first Home Ministers Meeting in New Delhi, so the membership of the grouping stands at seven. The Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation works as an institutional link between South Asia and South East Asia and promotes multi-sectoral cooperation, collective security and economic partnership among these countries. Options A and B understate the membership, and option D overstates it; the figure eight is the number of members in the South Asian regional grouping and is a common distractor. A further detail worth remembering is that the decision to hold BIMSTEC meetings at the level of Home Ministers was taken at the fourth summit of the grouping in 2018, and India committed at the sixth summit to host the first such meeting.

The correct answer is the Union Home Minister. Amit Shah, who holds the Home and Cooperation portfolio, chaired the first BIMSTEC Home Ministers Meeting in New Delhi and also led the Indian delegation to it. In his address he named five priority areas for cooperation, namely drug control, counter terrorism and legal cooperation, the return of fugitive criminals, cyber security and the investigation of cybercrime, and institutional cooperation with capacity building. Option A is wrong because the Prime Minister's role in this story was to propose the disaster management centre and to commit India to hosting the meeting at the sixth summit, not to chair it. Option C is wrong because the ministerial track here is the home affairs track, not the foreign affairs one. Option D is wrong but close to the facts, since the Union Home Secretary led the Senior Officials Meeting that was held before the ministers sat down, which is a different meeting at the official level.