Which of the following statements is/are correct? 1. The 15th ASEAN-India Summit was held virtually in March 2022. 2. European Union is India’s largest regional trading partner. Select the correct answer using the code given below.

Correct — B, 2 only. Statement 1 puts the wrong summit in the wrong month. The 15th ASEAN-India Summit was held at Manila on 14 November 2017, in person, alongside the East Asia Summit. These summits are annual, so by March 2022 the series had moved well past its fifteenth meeting — the 18th was held virtually in October 2021 and the 19th at Phnom Penh in November 2022. The virtual summit of 30 March 2022 that the statement seems to be reaching for was a different grouping altogether, the 5th BIMSTEC Summit, hosted and chaired by Sri Lanka. Statement 2 is the one the key accepts: taken as a bloc, the European Union was India's largest regional trading partner around the time of this paper.

• (a)1 only — It keeps the statement that fails on both its number and its date, and drops the one that stands. The 15th summit belongs to 2017 and to Manila.
• (c)Both 1 and 2 — Accepting both would require an ASEAN-India summit in March 2022. No such meeting took place; the virtual summit of that month was BIMSTEC's fifth.
• (d)Neither 1 nor 2 — This rejects statement 2 as well, but the European Union's standing as India's largest trading bloc was well established at the time of the exam.

India's engagement with ASEAN runs through an annual leaders' summit that began in 2002, alongside a free trade agreement in goods that came into force in 2010 and dialogue relations dating from 1992. Its trade relationship with the European Union runs on a different track — no free trade agreement, negotiations suspended in 2013 and relaunched in 2022, but a very large volume of goods and services trade because the bloc counts twenty-seven economies together.

Two habits settle items of this kind. The first is to check whether a numbered event can plausibly fall in the year given, since a summit series that meets annually and started in 2002 cannot be at its fifteenth meeting twenty years later. The second is to ask which grouping actually met on the date quoted, because examiners build these statements by transplanting a real event on to the wrong body, and the virtual summit of late March 2022 was BIMSTEC's. On statement 2, the word regional is carrying the weight. Ranked as individual countries, the United States and China were India's largest trading partners; ranked as blocs, the European Union came first, and that is the comparison the statement invites. The position has since been restated more precisely by the European Commission itself, which now records the European Union as India's third largest trading partner with goods trade of about 118 billion euro in 2025, or a little over eleven per cent of India's total trade, while remaining the largest single bloc.

• The 15th ASEAN-India Summit was held at Manila on 14 November 2017.
• The 18th ASEAN-India Summit was held virtually in October 2021 and the 19th at Phnom Penh in November 2022.
• The virtual summit of 30 March 2022 was the 5th BIMSTEC Summit, hosted and chaired by Sri Lanka.
• The ASEAN-India Trade in Goods Agreement came into force in 2010; India has been an ASEAN dialogue partner since 1992.
• India and the European Union relaunched free trade negotiations in 2022 after a suspension that had lasted since 2013.

• Accepting a summit number without checking whether an annual series could have reached it by that year.
• Attaching a real event to the wrong grouping. March 2022 belongs to BIMSTEC, not to ASEAN-India.
• Reading 'largest regional trading partner' as 'largest trading partner'. The first compares blocs, the second compares countries.

As a statement pair on summits and trade, as a question on which summit was held where, or through India's trade shares with named partners.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The 5th BIMSTEC Summit, held virtually on 30 March 2022, was chaired by

  • (a)India
  • (b)Thailand
  • (c)Sri Lanka
  • (d)Bangladesh

  Answer(c) Sri Lanka — it hosted and chaired the virtual summit at Colombo, and Thailand took over the chairmanship at its close.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The ASEAN-India Trade in Goods Agreement came into force in

  • (a)2003
  • (b)2010
  • (c)2015
  • (d)2020

  Answer(b) 2010 — signed in 2009 and in force from January 2010, well before the services and investment agreements.