External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar on Saturday visited the Japanese embassy here and convey condolences to Ambassador Satoshi Suzuki over the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
"For more than two decades, Shinzo Abe has symbolized our growing relationship. Many of its key initiatives were his personal efforts. He placed our ties in a larger global context of the free and open Indo-Pacific," Jaishankar tweeted after his visit to the embassy.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday penned a touching tribute to former Japanese premier Shinzo Abe, calling him a towering global statesman, a great champion of India-Japan friendship and a dear friend whose counsel inspired him in his economic choices for Gujarat as the state's then chief minister.
"We in India mourn his passing as one of our own, just as he embraced us with an open heart. He died doing what he loved the most inspiring his people. His life may have been cut short tragically, but his legacy will endure forever," Modi wrote in his blog on the Japan's longest-serving prime minister.
"Shinzo Abe—an outstanding leader of Japan, a towering global statesman, and a great champion of India-Japan friendship—is not among us anymore. Japan and the world have lost a great visionary. And, I have lost a dear friend," he added.
Abe, 67, died after being shot during a campaign speech Friday in western Japan.
Among Abe's greatest gifts to people and his most enduring legacy, one for which the world will always be indebted, is his foresight in recognising the changing tides and gathering storm of our times and his leadership in responding to it, Modi said.
The prime minister noted that long before others, Abe, in his seminal speech to Indian Parliament in 2007, laid the ground for the emergence of the Indo Pacific region as a contemporary political, strategic and economic reality -- a region that will also shape the world in this century.
