The India-France strategic partnership is celebrating its silver jubilee in all its shining glory. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is on a state visit to France as the chief guest at the Bastille Day celebrations to commemorate the all-encompassing and continuously evolving bilateral ties that is expected to go up further notches.
The internet is flooded with pictures of Modi being conferred the ‘Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour’, France’s highest civilian honour, the first for an Indian Prime Minister. The French have shown indomitable spirit after the unfortunate protests that brought life to a standstill. In his address, Modi solemnly drew similarities between the two countries’ respective experiences with radicalisation, setting the tone for charting more potent instruments of counter-terrorism.
Today, all eyes were on the Indian tri-Service contingent led by the Punjab regiment that marched down the Champs-Élysées to the Place de la Concorde, as patriotic Indian songs played by the Rajputana Rifles filled the air. The regiment fought alongside the French Army during World War I.
This is the second time the India-France bonhomie has been displayed in all its glory, after then-PM Manmohan Singh’s visit as the chief guest to Bastille Day in 2009. Needless to say, the world has undergone several paradigm shifts since then.
The India-France relationship is built on trust and reliability, fuelled by strategic autonomy and mutual respect. It has witnessed the profound deepening of the three prongs of space, nuclear, and defence cooperation. It is simultaneously evolving into newer domains, particularly a convergence on emerging economies and triangular cooperation in Africa and the Indo-Pacific.
The bilateral cooperation on developing palpable security architectures for the maritime domain of the Indo-Pacific Theatre remains a critical vertical. It is fuelled by the asymmetric rise of China and the resultant need to uphold a rules-based order by various tools in the Indo-Pacific region.
A relatively newer domain is the commitment to clean energy production, which will add more dimension and gravitas to an already preeminent relationship.
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The star performer
The strengthening of defence cooperation through a reinvigorated push for transfer of technology (ToT), higher sales figures, reliability of supply, and joint production remains the star performer for the India-France relationship.
Much has been written on the mainstay defence deals — the aircraft engine deal for India’s twin engine advanced multi-role combat aircraft (AMCA) where the French are reportedly offering a 100% ToT, the Scorpene submarines and the 26 Rafale (Marine) fighters for the Indian Navy.
These announcements are even more significant as they come weeks after India’s path-breaking collaboration with another key G-7 member, the US, on manufacturing GE’s F414 jet engines and with the initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology.
Within Europe, weeks before the PM embarked on his trip to Paris, the German defence minister touched down in New Delhi, flanked by top executives of the German defence industries. The country offered a more attractive joint production than it had done before. They have pitched to help India build six advanced submarines, which are a part of project P-75 India. The higher ToT will give India access to sea-proven air-independent propulsion technology that only Germany can boast of right now. Italy and Spain have also expressed a desire to venture into defence cooperation forays.
At a more fundamental level, a collective consciousness has emerged in the West that an empowered India in the Indo-Pacific can serve long-term Western interests. This empowerment cannot simply operate in the classic mercantilist paradigm. It has to translate into degrees of joint production, willingness to share technology—particularly critical and emerging tech and AI—and readiness to design the rules and norms for a new global order.
France in India’s strategic imagination
There is a special reason that France figures so prominently in India’s strategic imagination. The security paradigm has been New Delhi’s focus and priority.
Marred with twin border disputes and successive wars, a non-aligned India paid a price for empowering itself—isolation from major Western powers. It found itself shunned by the US after the 1974 nuclear tests when Washington withdrew support from the US-built nuclear plant in Tarapur. But France stepped up and supplied India with fuel for the plant.
Then in 1982, France and India signed their first military deal that landed New Delhi 40 Mirage planes.
The Tarapur nuclear power plant episode played a role in cementing the strategic partnership between the two countries in 1998 and subsequent civil nuclear cooperation.
After the May 1998 nuclear weapons test in Pokhran, India was again shunned by the West, including Japan, which later emerged as a true strategic ally. Once again, it was France that kept operating in genuine strategic autonomy mode and continued the cooperation on defence, space and nuclear, which had been agreed upon in January that year during President Jacques Chirac’s visit to India.
France has also proved its reliability at the UNSC where, as a permanent member, it has always supported India on Kashmir and New Delhi’s bid for permanent membership.
It is this bedrock of trust and reliability maintained over half a century that is rare in the often dry and indifferent terrain of International politics, where only self-interests seem to govern state behaviour.
But the India-France relationship isn’t only about the golden past. It is also about the luminescent future where the two countries are headed. Certain key areas of convergence have emerged in recent years.
France’s role in the Indian Ocean region
The Indo-Pacific is a huge maritime area. While the US pivot is more visible and tangible in the Pacific Ocean sub-theatre, France is more active in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) with 2,000 troops on the southern and 1,500 troops on the western side.
From India’s perspective, while Quad collaboration is key in the Pacific Ocean theatre, France’s preeminent position and presence in the Indian Ocean are key as well. India and France converge in maintaining freedom of navigation, coordinated patrols, and joint exercises that have been on a steady rise since the 2018 Joint Strategic Vision. France has been a member of India’s naval initiatives in the region for a long time.
The second evolving vertical here concerns co-designing norms and regulations around maritime domain awareness (MDA).
Long before MDA emerged as a buzzword, India and France had started to put together frameworks for deepening cooperation on MDA starting from 2018. The proliferation of mini-laterals like the India-France-Australia and India-France-UAE also push a healthy multilateralism in this wide security theatre.
Also Read: Modi in France, Navy gets €10 bn boost as proposal for 26 Rafale-Ms, 3 Scorpenes cleared
Convergence on emerging economies
India’s G20 presidency and France’s recently held Summit for a New Global Financial Pact are both aimed at building a “new consensus” to meet the interlinked global targets of tackling poverty, climate adaptation and mitigation, and clean energy production.
Ideas tabled there echoed India’s agenda for the emerging economies of the G20—mainly on a structural change of the International Monetary Fund, Special Drawing Rights and the World Bank.
Therefore, India and France can synergistically converge on the concerns of the emerging economies in two theatres. One is in Africa, where the two countries have had a dialogue since 2017. Several areas could be mapped between France’s ODA and India’s Line of Credit to dozens of African countries. In fact, the International Solar Alliance of 2015 is a good tool to deliver Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through triangular cooperation in Africa as well.
The other theatre is the Indo-Pacific. India-France’s Indo-Pacific Trilateral Development Cooperation Framework of 2022 was put together to facilitate development projects, especially in the framework of the International Solar Alliance (ISA). It could complement the Ministerial Forum for Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, which was steered by France when it was heading the EU Council and which brings together the 27 EU member states and 32 Indo-Pacific states, including India, together to discuss sustainable developmental agendas.
Emerging cooperation in the maritime domain and triangular cooperation in Africa and Indo-Pacific, where China too projects itself as the champion of the emerging economies, will delineate several of France’s often inscrutable layers of relationship with Beijing, its view of future European economic dynamic, and European strategic autonomy. All these are of immense interest to New Delhi as well.
The most valuable key takeaway from this silver jubilee partnership is its desire to shape the emerging global order. It is a partnership “not of free riders, but free thinkers” that take pride in their own perspective and chase it with elan.
It is also worth mentioning that the hallmark strategic autonomy so embedded in our respective worldviews aren’t mirror images. The contextual and experiential differences do not pull us apart but enrich our conversations on our role in the global order and the perils and opportunities of our times. France and India present a worthy template of how to conduct relations in a very unstable world despite their respective differences.
The writer is an Associate Fellow, Europe and Eurasia Center, at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. She tweets @swasrao. Views are personal.