Military ties to take centre stage as Modi visits France

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi begins a two-day visit to France on Thursday where he will attend the traditional Bastille Day military parade as guest of honour and discuss major new defence
deals.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s red-carpet welcome for the Hindu
nationalist leader comes weeks after Modi was given the rare honour of a
White House state dinner in Washington — a city he was once banned from
visiting.

Despite differences over the war in Ukraine and tensions over human rights in
India, New Delhi and Western democracies are keen on deepening ties because
of mutual concerns about China.

“India is one of the pillars of our Indo-Pacific strategy,” an aide to Macron
told reporters this week on condition of anonymity.

Macron has made Modi guest of honour for the July 14 military parade, which
kicks off France’s national day celebrations, with the participation of
Indian troops and Indian-flown French-made fighter jets underlining close
defence ties.

India is one of the biggest buyers of French arms, with Modi announcing a
landmark deal for 36 Rafale fighter jets during a trip to Paris in 2015 that
was worth around 4.0 billion euros ($4.24 billion) at the time.

He is set to unveil the purchase of another 26 marine versions of the state-
of-the-art aircraft during this visit, as well as a deal for three Scorpene-
class submarines, according to reports by the Tribune news website in France
and the Hindustan Times newspaper in India.

New Delhi is seeking to rapidly modernise its armed forces, with fears about
China’s assertiveness heightened by simmering disputes along its Himalayan
frontier.

– Rights concerns –

Modi has visited France four times since Macron came to power in 2017, while
Macron was feted on a state visit to New Delhi in 2018.

Aides on both sides have talked up the personal chemistry between the two
leaders and pointed to cooperation on climate change and solar, space
technology and nuclear power, as part of the 25-year-old “strategic
partnership” between France and India.

Modi told French newspaper Les Echos that bilateral trade had doubled in the
last nine years and Macron’s “thinking really matches ours”.

India and France “are naturally compatible” and “we see France as one of our
foremost global partners,” Modi added.

But the 72-year-old Indian leader remains a controversial figure at home and
in the West, dating back to his tenure as chief minister of the western state
of Gujarat in 2002 when around 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in
sectarian riots.

He has been dogged by allegations that he was complicit in the violence and
was once subject to a US State Department travel ban over his role. Indian
government probes have cleared him of culpability.

Since his first crushing electoral victory in 2014, Modi has regularly been
denounced by rights groups for increased discrimination and violence towards
the country’s Muslims, as well as stifling independent media.

Leading French academic Christophe Jaffrelot said Modi was “in the process of
deconstructing India’s democratic institutions” in an article published this
week.

Few observers expect Macron to raise rights concerns publicly.

“The fact that explains France’s relative success in this relationship is
that unlike the US, the UK, Canada, Germany and a few other European
countries, you’ve hardly seen France commenting on the internal affairs of
India,” Constantino Xavier from the Centre for Social and Economic Progress,
a New Delhi-based think tank, said this week.

“That has been appreciated on the Indian side.”

– Balancing game –

India has also become a vital market for Western companies, its swelling
middle classes helping the economy to be the fifth-biggest in the world.

Many European and American businesses including US tech giant Apple are also
ramping up production in India to mitigate the threat of supply chain
disruptions from China.

The war in Ukraine has heightened concerns in the West about the risk of
conflicts disrupting the flow of key raw materials and technology from China,
but it has also exposed a rift with India.

New Delhi, which has long sought to balance its ties with Moscow and the
West, has declined to condemn Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and has
emerged as a top buyer of discounted Russian oil during the biggest conflict
in Europe since World War II.

“This has been a major stumbling block for the India-Europe partnership,”
said Garima Mohan, an Indian foreign policy expert at the German Marshall
Fund of the United States, a think tank, during an online debate at the
Brookings Institution this week. (BSS/AFP)