“We have succeeded in having India, a superpower, have an interest in Hungary’s success, and this is one of the greatest achievements of the development of bilateral cooperation and the building of foreign relations of recent years”, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó said in a statement to Hungarian news agency MTI from New Delhi on Thursday.

“Amidst the changes in global politics and the global economy, it is clear that it is extremely important to a middle-sized country such as Hungary for major powers have an interest in its success, or at least not to have a conflicting interest with relation to that. We could not have had a more important foreign policy goal than this with relation to India, and this is now something that we have successfully achieved”, the Minister explained.

“Hungary has linked itself to India, which is one of the world’s most highly populated countries, is the world’s seventh largest economy, and is in the category of superpower economically, militarily and politically alike, on a host of points. It has built strategic cooperation with it on a host of points, and this is a huge success in view of the fact that the whole world is standing in line to be able to establish cooperation with India”, he stated.

“Hungary first succeeded in achieving this within the field of the economy, in view of the fact that the largest Indian enterprises, which are also among the global economy’s largest corporations, have appeared in Hungary one after the other and are continuously creating new jobs”, he explained. “During the next few months we will once again be announcing the creating of around a thousand new jobs thanks to investments by Indian corporations”, he pointed out.

“Cooperation between the two countries is also good at a political level. Hungary is supporting India’s bid for membership of the UN Security Council, and the parties regard it as their joint duty to reform the United Nations so that is conforms to a better extent to reality”, he pointed out. “There is also close education cooperation between the two countries: 200 Indian students attend Hungarian universities each year thanks to state scholarships, following which they contribute to spreading the country’s good reputation throughout the world”, Mr. Szijjártó said.

The Minister also highlighted that the two nations, both of which have extremely rich cultural and historic traditions, respect each other’s culture. “Artistic cooperation between the two countries is also extremely important”, Mr. Szijjártó added. “We have finalised the text of the film production agreement that will result in more Indian movies that ever before being filmed in Hungary. It is no accident that the Indian film industry is called Bollywood, because many compare it to the American film industry and it can most certainly compete with the American film industry when it comes to the number of movies produced”, he said. “Indian people often like to travel to places that they have seen in Indian films, and it is no accident that last year the number of Indian tourists visiting Hungary increased by 25 percent to over 50 thousand”, Mr. Szijjártó declared.

(MTI)