New Delhi: Defence cooperation, a new consulate, upgrading visa services and working on the European Union (EU)-India Free Trade Agreement (FTA) — Spain’s ambassador to India José María Ridao has been busy trying to deepen ties between Madrid and New Delhi.
In an interview with ThePrint Wednesday, Ridao asserted that Spain’s contribution to India’s aim of strategic autonomy in foreign affairs is via defence cooperation.
“Defence industries are a very important element. Why is it so important? Why do we consider it also our contribution to the Indo-Pacific? Being a new country in this part of the world, being a country without any issue with any member of the Indo-Pacific system, we are in a good position to contribute with India to achieve the goal India is trying to achieve, which is strategic autonomy,” Ridao said.
He added: “If you think that looking at the reality of the world and the movements that India wants to do, being more independent from the dependencies of the past, the risk India has is to fall down on the other side. Spain is the right country to come here because I always insist that sometimes Spain is the best concealed secret.”
Ridao also explained that defence cooperation is Madrid’s “main contribution for the time being”.
The Indian Air Force received its first C-295 transport aircraft manufactured by European aviation major Airbus in Spain’s Seville, as reported by ThePrint in September.
The IAF has placed an order for 56 C-295 aircraft. While 16 will arrive in flyaway condition from Spain, 40 will be manufactured in India through a partnership between Tata Advanced Systems Limited and Airbus.
Spanish ship building firm Navantia is also a contender for the mega submarine programme called Project-75 (India) or P-75(I), under which six conventional submarines are to be built with the Air Independent Propulsion System.
Significantly, however, trade in goods between the Iberian nation and India stood at $7.66 billion in 2022-23, according to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry — a mere 0.66 percent of India’s total trade of $1.167 trillion for the same financial year.
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Visas and FTA negotiations
The one stumbling block that an Indian commonly faces when travelling to a foreign country, is visas.
Ridao noted this issue and told ThePrint that the Spanish embassy here has focussed on going “beyond” in improving the issuance of visas as well as opening a new consulate in Bengaluru in the next few months.
“There is another aspect that is important (to Spain-India ties), you have to live in India to discover its importance, which is visas…From the Spanish government and the Spanish embassy we have tried to go beyond the efforts we have done in the past,” said the envoy.
“That is why we will open a new consulate general in Bengaluru in three months’ time, we are improving our premises of the embassy in Delhi and we are also improving the consulate general in Mumbai. The number of visas is increasing a lot,” he added.
Between July and December 2023, Spain is also the rotating president of the Council of the European Union. As one of the three presidents of the EU, the government in Madrid has outlined a priority for its tenure on the reindustrialisation of Europe.
On whether this would make it more difficult for countries like India to enter the European markets in Spain, Ridao made it clear that the “missing link” between India and the EU is the long discussed FTA. “I think the link missing in this description is free trade. So that is why Spain was so interested in recovering the initiative of the Portuguese presidency of the Council of the EU, in order to go ahead with the FTA between India and the EU.”
Ridao further said, “We have to work for free markets. Spain also invested during its presidency in order to have this FTA with India signed. It is true that it is very difficult at this moment. But it is also true that in the last two or three months, in the last round of negotiations, the positions are closer.”
However, he conceded that the time is tight due to the upcoming polls in India as well as in the EU (European Parliament elections) next year. There have been six rounds of negotiations since the EU-India FTA discussions were relaunched in 2022. The latest round of negotiations happened in October this year.
“It is very difficult because it depends on the will of both parties. The impression I have is that the will does exist on both sides,” Ridao said, echoing the thoughts of another EU member-state diplomat, Lithuanian envoy Diana Mickevičienė.
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)
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