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Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be the Guest of Honour at France’s Bastille Day parade in Paris on Friday. The visit coincides with 25 years of the oldest among India’s almost 30 strategic partnerships around the world — and one of the few that has been marked by “total convergence” ever since the two nations committed themselves to it in 1998.
Four French Presidents and three Indian Prime Ministers have nurtured this relationship over the last quarter century. Manmohan Singh was the chief guest at the 2009 parade, which opened with Indian tri-services personnel marching to Saare Jahan Se Achha and Kadam Kadam Badhaye Ja. Nicolas Sarkozy was President at the time.
This time, as the tri-services contingent marches down the Champs-Élysées, three French Rafale fighter aircraft recently inducted into the Indian Air Force will perform a flypast.
The two countries commenced their strategic partnership, India’s first, immediately after India’s nuclear tests, at a time when most Western capitals had turned their backs on New Delhi.
“France was the first country to recognise the strategic importance of India after the nuclear tests in 1998. The partnership with France is India’s most important strategic partnership in Europe. It is one of the rare such partnerships that India has that is marked by total convergence,” Mohan Kumar, who was India’s Ambassador to France from 2015 to 2017 and now teaches at Jindal Global University, said.
D B Venkatesh Varma, a former Ambassador to Russia, described India and France as “mirror images of each other” in their common quest for strategic autonomy in the midst of big power play.
“Although India and France are on different continents, there is a remarkable resonance in the strategic outloook. At critical points, France has stood by India, including during the civil nuclear negotiations with the US, when President Jacques Chirac, on his visit to India in February 2006, sent a strong message to President George W Bush that India should not be boxed into a corner,” Varma, who was part of the Indian negotiating team for the US deal, said.
According to the French foreign ministry, the partnership “focuses on…civil nuclear energy, defence, counter-terrorism, space cooperation, cyber security and digital technologies”.
The signing of an agreement for the supply of 36 Rafale aircraft in September 2016, and an industrial agreement in March 2018 to build six European pressurized water reactors (EPR) at the Jaitapur site are directly linked to this partnership, the French ministry site says.
Coming within three weeks of a visit to the United States that both sides hailed as a “great success”, Prime Minister Modi’s visit to France is an opportunity for India to assert its strategic autonomy, Kumar said. “France’s strong belief in its own strategic autonomy adds to India’s strategic autonomy. On both sides, there is an appreciation of each other’s thinking on this,” he said.
The defence relationship, a critical element in ties, is marked by trust and reliability. While defence deals with the US are dogged by unpredictability due to Congressional interventions and export control regimes, the French deals come with no strings attached. France understands that India would not like to put all its defence eggs in one basket.
The PM’s visit is likely to see agreements or announcements on the acquisition of 26 Rafale-M (the marine version) fighters for the Indian Navy, and co-production of three more Scorpene class submarines at the public sector Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders Ltd, which has already produced six Scorpene/Kalvari-class submarines under an earlier agreement.
As talk of the US-India deal on technology transfer for the GE F414 jet engine for the Tejas Light Combat Aircraft became louder earlier this year, the French offered their own Safran engine that would be fully made in India. While the US offer, which signalled a major breakthrough in India-US defence ties, does not include the transfer of a critical part of the technology, the French are said to have promised 100 per cent technology transfer.
The two sides also cooperate closely on climate change initiatives. Last October, they signed a Road Map on Green Hydrogen, which aims “to bring the French and Indian hydrogen ecosystems together” to establish a reliable and sustainable value chain for a global supply of decarbonised hydrogen.
Earlier in February 2022, they signed a Road Map on the Blue Economy and Ocean Governance.
Another roadmap on digital technology co-operation may be on the cards for 6G, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. An MoU signed last month between NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL) and Lyra, a France-based payment services provider, may be implemented soon to enable UPI and RuPay payments in Europe.
Both India and France value their strategic autonomy, pursue independence in their foreign policies, and seek a multipolar world, even as both acknowledge the place and importance of the US in the world order.
In April, on his way back to France after a three-day state visit to Beijing where he had long meetings with President Xi Jinping, President Emmanuel Macron told accompanying media that Europe must not get entangled in America’s confrontation with China and preserve its “strategic autonomy”.
He warned that Europe’s security dependence on the US and the “extraterritoriality of the dollar” could turn European states into “vassals” if the US-China confrontation escalated. He also pushed the idea of Europe as a “third superpower” with France in the lead.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the geopolitical changes it triggered have brought a new European awareness of the strategic importance of India and vice versa. As India’s foremost partner in Europe, France, with its more nuanced view of the war than most other countries in the continent, has a better appreciation than other European states of New Delhi’s position on the war, including that the world has to make serious diplomatic efforts to restore peace.
“India understands that if at all there has to be a rapprochement between Europe and Russia, it will have to be led by France. It would be a litmus test of French ability to impact on an issue of global significance,” Varma said.
For this reason, French support will also be critical to a consensus outcome at the G20 summit in New Delhi this September. India remains hopeful that differences over the war in Ukraine will not block a positive outcome. The visit could provide an opportunity for the Prime Minister to understand better the French and European assessment of the war, and be prepared to take “tough decisions” with regard to forging consensus at the G20 summit Kumar said.
As the the only EU state with territories in the Indo-Pacific, France could be an important partner for building maritime domain awareness and keep an eye on China’s presence in the region, augmenting New Delhi’s participation in the Quad, Kumar said.
However, he cautioned against assuming that France’s views on China were the same as India’s. “France has a different relationship with China, and India should appreciate that,” Kumar said. He said that in its trade and commercial relationship with China, the French may not be able to even de-risk, let alone decouple. “Where France can help India is to build up its maritime defence, which they are doing on a transactional basis,” Kumar said.
Modi and Macron enjoy great personal rapport. India did not let last week’s rioting and violence in Paris come in the way of the Indian prime minister’s visit. The two countries have had a tradition of not commenting on each other’s internal issues. Macron is unlikely to bring up the Manipur, issue or India’s perceived backsliding on human rights and religious freedoms, the subjects of a blistering European Parliament resolution adopted on Thursday.
