As technology increasingly becomes the central arena of geopolitical competition, reshaping global power dynamics, the India-EU partnership stands at a critical juncture to expand strategic influence through joint action. The bilateral Trade and Technology Council (TTC), launched in 2023, and the EU’s new five-pillar strategic agenda for India, published in September 2025, collectively present an unprecedented opportunity to build a consequential democratic technology alliance. India and the EU could seize the moment to pitch together an actionable agenda as the UN’s Global Mechanism for ICT security, agreed in July 2025, is implemented. The question is whether these frameworks can be operationalised with sufficient urgency to shape the global digital order.
Although the September 2025 strategic agenda awaits formal adoption at an early 2026 summit, it explicitly positions technology and innovation as one of five core pillars alongside security, connectivity, prosperity, and sustainability. This elevation of technology from a subset of economic cooperation to a standalone strategic pillar reflects a fundamental political recognition: digital infrastructure, cyber capabilities, and emerging technologies are now essential to the issue of strategic autonomy and reshaping geopolitical influence. For democracies seeking alternatives between American tech dominance and Chinese digital authoritarianism, political decisions regulating the digital arena matter profoundly.
Amidst the growing digital contestation, the India-EU TTC provides the institutional architecture for this technology partnership; however, its operationalisation has lacked ambition. While working groups on semiconductors, digital connectivity, and emerging technologies exist on paper, concrete deliverables remain modest. This disconnect reflects structural challenges — the EU’s consensus-driven processes, India’s domestic policy complexities, and the absence of an executive authority characterising the US-EU TTC. But it also reveals a deeper political malaise: The tendency to treat technology cooperation as a diplomatic exercise rather than a strategic imperative requiring sustained, action-oriented leadership and engagement.
The establishment of the UN Global Mechanism on ICT security in July 2025 marks a pivotal moment in global cyber governance. After five years of OEWG negotiations, member states finally agreed on the first permanent institutional structure for global cyber diplomacy. Although not perfect, it is a consequential breakthrough because cyber governance has become emblematic of the broader struggle over technology’s future. Russia’s deployment of cyber operations in Ukraine, state-sponsored hacking campaigns, and ransomware proliferation have exposed the dangers of an unregulated normative vacuum in cyberspace. The permanent mechanism provides a framework for developing actionable norms of responsible state behaviour—provided that key democratic partners collectively lead and shape the outcomes.
India and the EU are natural partners in strengthening global cybersecurity and digital governance. Both have been targets of significant cyber operations and are committed to maintaining a free and open internet while balancing security imperatives with civil liberties. Both recognise that cyberspace fragmentation along geopolitical lines threatens the foundations of digital economy’s architecture. The EU brings robust regulatory sophistication through instruments like the NIS2 Directive and Cyber Resilience Act. India contributes valuable operational experience, a strategic position bridging the Global South and advanced economies, and proven capabilities in digital public infrastructure.
While their strategic convergence extends beyond defensive measures, it should also move towards proactive technological cooperation. The TTC should become the key platform for coordinated tech diplomacy—developing shared positions on responsible AI governance, data sovereignty principles, and cyber stability to influence global norms that can be championed within the UN mechanism. This requires continuous collaboration and moving beyond sporadic ministerial meetings to sustained engagement among regulators, industry, researchers, and civil society. Concrete steps could include creating joint innovation funds, harmonising standards where feasible, and building interoperable digital infrastructure that demonstrates democratic alternatives to authoritarian tech ecosystems.
The complementarities between are compelling. The EU’s experience with digital identity frameworks paired with India’s resounding success with UPI and Aadhaar suggests possibilities for collaborative models that balance privacy protection with scalability. Europe’s regulatory frameworks combined with India’s software engineering talent and cost efficiency could create competitive alternatives in semiconductor design, cloud computing, and AI development. But realising this potential will require moving beyond dialogue to concrete collaboration and implementation.
However, developing common positions demands honest negotiation between different digital concerns. The EU’s emphasis on data protection and privacy sometimes conflicts with India’s security-centric approach and emphasis on data sovereignty. India’s resistance to European data localisation requirements contrasts with its own domestic storage mandates in certain sectors. These are not insurmountable differences but require mutual accommodation and political will to prioritise enhancing the strategic partnership over regulatory parochialism.
The intensifying geopolitics of technology makes such accommodation between them both urgent and politically strategic. Global supply chains are reorganising around trust and resilience rather than pure efficiency. Technology ecosystems are splintering along geopolitical fault lines, while semiconductor rivalries, AI competition, and quantum computing races are redrawing technology power maps and influence. In this context, democratic nations face a stark choice: compete separately and risk irrelevance, or cooperate to build genuine value-based alternatives to dependency on either American platforms or Chinese infrastructure.
Thus the India-EU partnership, anchored by the strategic agenda’s technology pillar and operationalised through the TTC, could become the template for this democratic technology cooperation. Success in cyber governance through the UN mechanism would demonstrate the viability of a rules-based digital order. Joint India-EU infrastructure projects would prove that democracies can deliver at scale, while coordinated approaches to emerging technologies would demonstrate that innovation and values can coexist.
However, time is of the essence. The summit in early 2026 represents a critical moment — to translate strategic ambition into measurable outcomes with comprehensive plans with clear deliverables, timelines, and accountability mechanisms. The previous Roadmap 2025 was ambitious but weak in implementation and the upcoming agenda must prioritise execution over aspiration.
The implications of a successful India-EU technology partnership transcends bilateral relations as it would establish a model of cooperation for like-minded democracies globally. If they cannot move beyond diplomatic rhetoric to operational cooperation, they cede the future of technology leadership to actors with less ethical and social concerns. While the frameworks exist and the strategic logic is compelling, there is an urgent need of political will and institutional agility to make it real — not in years, but in months.
Bava is Chairperson, European Studies and Jean Monnet Chair, SIS, and Chairperson, Special Centre for National Security Studies, JNU, Bhattacharjee is a defence and tech policy adviser and former country head of General Dynamics
