With the long-awaited India-EU Free Trade Agreement inching closer to reality, Union External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar on Thursday, September 24, 2026, met Slovenian Foreign Minister Tone Kajzer — a pointed signal that New Delhi is working its bilateral channels across Europe to keep the momentum alive.

What the two ministers put on the table

The conversation, as Dr. Jaishankar described it, was broad and substantive. The ministers discussed 'emerging trade and investment opportunities as we move towards the actualisation of the India-EU FTA' — covering energy, manufacturing, digital technology, connectivity, defence and multilateral cooperation. That is nearly the full spectrum of a modern bilateral relationship, compressed into a single meeting.

Slovenia is a European Union member state with which India has maintained diplomatic ties since 1992. While it is not among the bloc's largest economies, Ljubljana holds a seat at the EU table — and in the intricate choreography of FTA diplomacy, individual member-state endorsements matter.

Why the India-EU FTA is the real headline here

The India-EU Broad-Based Trade and Investment Agreement has a complicated history. Talks launched years ago were suspended in 2013 after hitting deadlock over market access and regulatory differences. They were relaunched in 2022 with renewed political will on both sides — and since then, New Delhi has pursued a deliberate strategy: engage EU member states bilaterally, build goodwill, and translate that into negotiating tailwind at the bloc level.

The European Union is India's largest trading partner, making the FTA one of the most consequential trade deals either side could clinch. Indian exporters, defence manufacturers and digital firms all have skin in the game. Every bilateral meeting like this one with Slovenia adds a brick to that larger architecture.

Defence and digital — the newer pillars

The explicit mention of defence and digital alongside the more traditional trade-and-investment framing is telling. India's defence exports have grown sharply in recent years, and European partners — particularly smaller EU states — are increasingly receptive to co-production and technology-sharing arrangements. On the digital side, data governance, cybersecurity cooperation and connectivity infrastructure have become standard items on any India-Europe agenda.

Including multilateral dimensions in the readout also signals that both sides compared notes on shared positions at forums like the United Nations and the G20 — the diplomatic version of aligning clocks before a joint race.

One bilateral meeting with a mid-sized EU member may look modest on paper — but in the geometry of a 27-nation trade negotiation, these conversations are exactly how consensus gets built, one capital at a time.