Until it became clear that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was going to fly to Jakarta, speculation was rife that he could sail from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to Aceh. This was not a madcap proposition - at their closest, these two land masses are just around 200km apart.
In fact, India's first prime minister, Mr Jawaharlal Nehru, sailed from these islands when he visited Indonesia in 1950. Had Mr Modi followed suit, it would have been a spectacular endorsement of the maritime links between the two ancient seafaring countries that have traded with each other for millennia.
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