The journey ahead for India-France relationship

Sandeep Dikshit

Geography and history are such that India and France do not share the same security contexts,” Jean-Yves Le Drian, then France’s Minister of Defence, had said in 2013 at a seminar in Delhi. He then went on to explain the reason why modern-day France bucked geography and history to forge an uninterrupted 71-year defence relationship with Independent India. “Globalisation, technological progress, the cross-cutting nature of current or impending threats are such that today we are more exposed to threats that are similar on several counts,” Le Drian explained.

Add to it the common desire of both India and France to preserve their strategic autonomy in international relations. This brings about a degree of comfort in ignoring pressure points in pursuing a bilateral relationship.

From France, On the Guest list

This will be the sixth time a French leader will be the Chief Guest at the Republic Day celebrations.

• 1976 Jacques Chirac, Prime Minister of France
• 1980 Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, President of France
• 1998 Jacques Chirac, President of France
• 2008 Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France
• 2016 François Hollande, President of France
• 2024 Emmanuel Macron, President of France

This came into play in 1998 when the US pressured its allies to join hands in imposing sanctions on India for conducting nuclear tests under the Vajpayee government. The UK duly complied by denying maintenance for the Indian Navy’s Sea King helicopters but France did not, and went on to provide critically required munitions for the Kargil War that took place a year after the nuclear tests when large chunks of the West were reluctant to breach the sanctions regime.

London was to let down India for a second time. With weeks left to go, US President Joe Biden declined an invitation to attend this year’s Republic Day parade. India turned to the UK, but Rishi Sunak was unwilling. French President Emmanuel Macron immediately accepted India’s request to be the Chief Guest for the Republic Day parade, recalled a senior Indian diplomat.

The warmth, undergirded by uninterrupted defence contracts, has been enduring. Narendra Modi was the second Indian Prime Minister in nearly 15 years to stand as the Guest of Honour at the French Bastille Day parade on July 14 last year.

Fittingly, the first contingent of foreign soldiers to march at the Republic Day parade were troops from the 35th Infantry Regiment of the French Army in 2016 when the then French President Francois Holland was the Chief Guest. India chose France as the first recipient of this honour also due to its consistent pro-Indian position on Kashmir. Nor has France been hypocritically preachy on human rights. This is in contrast to the Biden administration’s tacit approval to anti-India lobbies to operate on US soil, of which the Gurpatwant Singh Pannun case is the most glaring example.

Asked about reports of France being offered a fresh contract of two dozen Rafale fighter jets, a senior Indian diplomat remarked, “Of course they will want to sell more.” But do the French want to manufacture more in India? This is the crucial crossroads at which the Indo-French ties currently stand.

The bilateral trade is neither high, nor diversified. PM Modi’s visit for the Bastille Day parade saw ambitious Roadmaps being inked. The key is in their implementation, which is being pursued in Paris by Indian Ambassador Jawed Ashraf, one of the few diplomats to have received an extension in service, perhaps because of the intensity of ongoing exchanges that promise a breakthrough. From the South Block, the MEA and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval have had multiple interactions with French President Emmanuel Macron’s trusted Diplomatic Adviser Emmanuel Bonne for five years to metamorphise the buyer-seller military relationship.

The fruits are just about visible and the upcoming interaction between teams led by PM Modi and Macron ought to operationalise the agreement signed under the Horizon 2047 Roadmap to make the Safran helicopter engines in India. This document had identified specific areas of partnership in hi-tech, specifically civilian nuclear energy, space and cybersecurity.

The meeting would be keenly watched to see if the high-level interaction next week will bring more to the table in these domains. After all, many of France’s diversified corporate majors have benefited from the Indian market for several decades. It may be time for companies like Dassault, Eurocopter, MBDA, Nexter, Safran and Thales to make India a permanent base for manufacturing some of their defence products.

At a time when the West is facing a raging migrant crisis — France had a taste of the overwhelming Indian desire to quit their country when 300 of them chartered a plane from UAE to Nicaragua with the intention of entering the US as illegals — can the warmth in bilateral ties sustain France’s promise to allow 30,000 Indian students to study in their country by 2030? Currently, a total of 10,000 Indian students are in France.

France did play an important role in ensuring that the Indian Navy joined the European Union’s naval monitoring mission in the Persian Gulf and the Multinational Task Force based in Bahrain. And the two sides, with the experience obtained from an unbroken series of naval joint exercises for more than two decades, have signed a logistics-sharing agreement that allows the two navies to draw replenishments from each other’s bases.

A major player in the Indo-Pacific as it retained colonial outposts in the oceans, France has indicated that it would not mind a joint presence in the maritime domain. The canvas is wide. Apart from the priority zones of the European periphery, the Mediterranean basin and Sahelian Africa, France also pays close attention to the politics and economics of equatorial Africa, the Arabo-Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, but also much farther in Asia.

Indeed, both France and India have a common reason as they were jolted by the supersecret alliance between Australia, the US and the UK to build nuclear submarines for the Indo-Pacific. India might not have joined the AUKUS alliance, but it was galling to have been kept in the dark about it. France suffered a deeper blow. Australia cancelled its contract with France for submarines in order to build nuclear-powered submarines with the US and the UK under the AUKUS alliance.

For the Indian Navy, which prides itself as capable of operating in the blue waters, it will be a learning experience from the French about safeguarding islands vulnerable to pirates or squatting an occupation by a proxy militant group. France has about 20,000 troops, along with fighter jets, aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. In 2018, India and France had agreed on a ‘Joint Strategic Vision of India-France Cooperation in the Indian Ocean Region’. The Roadmap on the Indo-Pacific signed during PM Modi’s France visit last year extends it to the Pacific.

Beyond an expansion of military ties, New Delhi expects Macron’s visit to add substance to the two Roadmaps signed in cutting-edge technology — the Indo-French Roadmap on Cybersecurity and Digital Technology and the Roadmap on Green Hydrogen.

Based on the Indo-French Roadmap on Cybersecurity and Digital Technology adopted in 2019, India and France are pursuing an ambitious bilateral cooperation on advanced digital technologies, particularly in supercomputing, cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence, and quantum technologies. As is the case with the US, the take-off stage is imminent.

In a world of quid pro quos, France will have to overcome a major disappointment to induce itself to get the intention to work in labs and factories. Assured contracts for six nuclear power plants in Jaitapur, Maharashtra, by the UPA government, the proposal is nowhere near implementation. France, like Russia and the US, would want to push the in-vogue small mobile reactors. And as is the case with Russia and the US, India would stall France’s proposal till the technology matures.

Official documents hint at considerable pending work till both sides start working together on space, digital, critical technologies, energy, ecological and urban transition. If this hesitation is because India may not have fulfilled its part of the bargain in the civil nuclear sphere, the negotiation skills of the PM Modi-led negotiating team will be tested to translate intentions about cooperation in cutting-edge technologies into practice.

Charting out ties

Ambassador to France Jawed Ashraf has dealt with sensitive subjects for the bulk of his career. His involvement with MEA’s American affairs spans a decade and he perhaps is a rare officer to have served in the PMOs of both Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi. Among the few career diplomats to have been given an extension, his close rapport with Elysee Palace ensured that the French President immediately accepted the offer to be the Chief Guest at the R-Day parade at an extremely short notice.

Big responsibility came early to Emmanuel Bonne. At 49, he became the Diplomatic Adviser to French President Emmanuel Macron in 2019, a post he has held since. The post is important because Macron has centralised big foreign policy decisions. For two years before entering Elysee Palace, Bonne was highly regarded by Jean-Yves Le Drian. Bonne has interacted closely with NSA Ajit Doval and Jawed Ashraf, playing a key role in charting out the Indo-French ties in the post-Covid period.

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