France poised to become India’s key ally

K. P. Nayar

Strategic Analyst

THE visit of PM Narendra Modi to Paris next month as guest of honour at the Bastille Day parade could turn out to be as historic as Indira Gandhi’s engagement with the Soviet Union in 1971, culminating in the seminal Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation.

If the Ukraine war drags on, Russia will no longer be able to fulfil its longstanding role as India’s arms supplier.

With the war in Ukraine betraying no possibilities of an early ceasefire, France is rapidly becoming what Russia was to India from the 1960s to the 1980s and on a diminished but important scale, after the break-up of the Soviet Union a decade later. If the Ukraine war drags on, Russia will no longer be able to fulfil its longstanding role as India’s most durable guarantor of arms supplies and as an ‘ally’ or what is its nearest term in diplomatic parlance. Moscow’s preoccupation will become self-defence. For India’s vital needs, France is the only country which can replace Russia in such an eventuality.

The 25th anniversary of the India-France Strategic Partnership, which has been cited in the July 14 invitation to Modi, is not just another date on the diplomatic calendar, which civil servants love to uphold as causes célèbres on such occasions. When India tested nuclear weapons in 1998, back-to-back with the signatures on this enduring strategic partnership, France was the only big power to wholeheartedly back the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government’s decision to exercise the nuclear option. “What took you so long?” the then President Jacques Chirac asked Vajpayee’s special envoy Brajesh Mishra, as the two men went on a walk in the gardens of the Elysee Palace, breaking the sacrosanct French convention of not working on a Sunday.

Paris was Mishra’s first stop on a worldwide tour to counter sanctions imposed by the US and several of its allies against Pokhran-II. Wisely, Chirac also advised Mishra to somehow engage with the then US President Bill Clinton’s administration. Otherwise, normalcy in India’s relations with the rest of the world would be far more difficult to restore, Chirac opined. That conversation eventually led to the broadest engagement ever between India and the US afterwards, during talks between Jaswant Singh, then Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, and Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State. Modi was not in electoral politics then, but he kept abreast of these developments in his party leader Vajpayee’s government. So, memories of these Indo-French exchanges will be on his mind as he watches the Bastille Day parade along the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Modi is only the second Indian PM (after Manmohan Singh) to be the guest of honour at the celebrated parade.

Between 1998 and 2021, the wheel came a full circle. In September 2021, Australia shocked France by dumping a contract worth 56 billion euros for purchasing French submarines. Australia then rubbed salt in the wound by joining AUKUS, a new security pact with the US and the UK, which promised to help Canberra in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines.

Jean-Yves Le Drian, France’s the then Foreign Minister, called the creation of AUKUS and its fallout on the submarine deal a “stab in the back”. For the first time in history, France recalled its Ambassador in Washington. President Emmanuel Macron then telephoned Modi, the first foreign leader that he talked to about France’s deep disappointment about the AUKUS episode. A week later, Modi was to meet US President Joe Biden in Washington, and during that summit, the Prime Minister conveyed to Biden Macron’s anguish about what France considered a betrayal by its allies. Democracies should stick together and avoid fights of this kind, Modi counselled Biden. The US went into damage-control mode, and after several months of preparations to repair relations with France, Macron was received at the White House on December 1, 2022, on the first state visit that Biden hosted since he became President.

Modi’s Bastille Day talks with Macron will be an opportune occasion to explore a joint peace initiative by the two leaders to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict. France has a good appreciation of where India stands on this conflict. On a visit to Paris last week, this writer discovered that the French people at all levels share India’s views on the Ukraine war. Macron believes that no long-term European security architecture is possible without co-opting Russia. France does not desire to bring Russia to its knees — unlike the US — because that would only deepen insecurities in Europe. If at all such an eventuality came about, Europe would become ever more dependent on the US to ensure its security. That is not a prospect which is relished in Paris, where the broad view is that successive governments in Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain bartered away the continent’s strategic independence to Washington.

However, there are limits to how much of all this Macron can say in public without causing an open rift with many members of the European Union, especially the former satellite states of the Kremlin. For the Biden administration too, any such articulation would be heresy. France would be digging a hole for itself if it were alone in stating such views. But together with Modi, Macron could go some way in being expressive in this regard. And if they reach out to Russian President Vladimir Putin with a peace plan anchored in such a policy framework, a pause in the war may be feasible.

Macron is one world statesman who incessantly tried in the weeks before February 24 last year to prevent the Ukraine war. Even after the conflict started, Macron was regularly on the phone with Putin until miscreants with vested interests sowed the seeds of distrust between them. Modi has met Putin since the start of the war. He would have just returned from Washington before he goes to Paris and would have a good idea of where the US stands on any peace initiative for Ukraine. Many world leaders want India to start a peace effort because it is uniquely placed to do so under the present circumstances. Modi is hesitant because he fears failure of any peace plan and short-sighted criticism by Opposition parties. If peace is initiated together with Macron, such pitfalls could be avoided by Modi even if their plans do not result in a ceasefire.

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