Modi to attend ASEAN-India and East Asia Summits in Manila from November 16 to 18

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will travel to Manila from November 16 to 18 to attend the 23rd ASEAN-India Summit and the 21st East Asia Summit, the Ministry of External Affairs announced at a special briefing in New Delhi on Thursday, November 12.

Secretary (East) Rudrendra Tandon told reporters that the Philippines, which chairs the 11-nation ASEAN this year, will host both meetings. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. will give a dinner for visiting leaders, and the summits themselves follow, with Modi due to attend them on Tuesday, November 17, according to reports of the briefing. Modi returns to India on Wednesday, November 18.

Maritime security and trade and investment are the main items on India’s list, and the Ministry has left open whether Modi will meet other leaders one-on-one. Tandon said bilateral meetings are planned on the sidelines but did not name the leaders.

What the Ministry said

Tandon described ASEAN as “a key element or building block of our Act East policy” and said India’s ties with all 11 member states are very active. The grouping, set up in 1967, now includes Timor-Leste as its eleventh member. The summit theme this year is “Navigating the Future”, and leaders are expected to talk about becoming more resilient to rapid change.

The agenda he listed for India-ASEAN cooperation runs from maritime domain awareness and maritime surveillance to digital public infrastructure and trade. India is expected to push for deeper maritime cooperation among like-minded Indo-Pacific countries.

The East Asia Summit, which began in 2005, is the ASEAN-led forum where India, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Russia sit with the ASEAN states to discuss security and shared concerns. The Ministry also said there is “a very strong demand from the Indian community to meet the Prime Minister”, and officials are trying to fit a community event into the schedule.

The trade review

Trade with the bloc is about $122 billion, roughly 10% of India’s global trade, and several ASEAN members each trade more than $25 billion a year with India. The balance has tilted against India: the trade deficit with ASEAN rose from $7.5 billion in 2011 to $44 billion in 2023.

The ASEAN-India Trade in Goods Agreement (AITIGA) came into force in 2011. Its review has been under way since 2020 and is not finished. New Delhi wants it completed as soon as possible and wants better market access, particularly in Vietnam and Indonesia, where some tariff cuts envisaged in 2011 have not been made. Tandon called the review “complex” and said the work is about building consensus. “That conversation is ongoing,” he said.

India and ASEAN: recent steps

1. 2011ASEAN-India Trade in Goods Agreement comes into force
2. 2020Review of the goods agreement begins and is still open
3. August 5, 2025Modi holds talks with Marcos Jr. in New Delhi during his state visit
4. October 26, 2025Modi joins the 22nd ASEAN-India Summit virtually
5. November 17, 2026Modi due at the 23rd ASEAN-India Summit in Manila

Myanmar and the Quad

Tandon also spoke on Myanmar, which has been kept away at the leaders’ level since the civil war began in February 2021. India should engage more, he said: isolating the country “is not the right approach”, and “someone else will fill that vacuum”. ASEAN agreed a five-point consensus on Myanmar in April 2021. Min Aung Hlaing, now Myanmar’s president, visited New Delhi earlier this year.

Whether Modi will sit down with US President Donald Trump, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for a Quad leaders’ summit in Manila is not settled. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was reported to have said last month that the next Quad summit would be held on the sidelines of the ASEAN meetings in the Philippines. Asked about it on Thursday, Tandon said, “We don’t have any information on this at the moment,” and described Modi’s bilateral and Quad engagements as not confirmed.

India was due to host the Quad leaders’ summit last year, but it did not take place because of a lack of clarity from Washington about Trump’s travel. If it is held, it would be the grouping’s first summit of leaders in two years, and reports say a formal Modi-Trump bilateral on the sidelines is unlikely. Our report on the state of India-US trade talks covers the other track between the two governments.

How we got here

Modi last took part in an ASEAN-India Summit on October 26, 2025, virtually, when the 22nd edition reviewed the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar represented him at the 20th East Asia Summit in Kuala Lumpur the next day. This year’s trip puts the Prime Minister in the room for both meetings.

Bilateral ties with the host are also recent. Marcos was in India on a five-day state visit in August 2025, and the two leaders held delegation-level talks in New Delhi on August 5, 2025, reviewing trade, defence, maritime cooperation, agriculture, health and digital technology. Bilateral trade was $3.5 billion in 2023-24.

Why it matters

For readers, the numbers sit in what India buys and sells. A tenth of India’s trade is with ASEAN, and the deficit of $44 billion means India imports far more from the bloc than it exports. A completed review of the 2011 agreement is aimed at closing that gap by opening more of Vietnam’s and Indonesia’s markets to Indian goods.

The maritime items bear on the sea lanes through which much of that trade moves. Tandon described India as an Indian Ocean country bordering Southeast Asia’s maritime zone, and cooperation on surveillance and domain awareness is on the agenda he listed.

What happens next

Modi leaves for Manila on Monday, November 16. The Marcos dinner and the summits follow, with the ASEAN-India Summit and the East Asia Summit expected on November 17, and he is due back on November 18. The bilateral meetings and any Quad meeting remain unconfirmed as of Thursday evening.