A billboard is seen ahead of French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to India in Jaipur, India, on Jan. 24.Vishal Bhatnagar/NurPhoto via Getty Images
French President Emmanuel Macron will be the chief guest at India’s Republic Day festivities this week. Macron wasn’t Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first choice; he planned to host U.S. President Joe Biden and other leaders from the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or the Quad. Biden declined the invitation last month. There is something fitting about Macron being this year’s chief guest. Last July, Modi attended France’s Bastille Day celebrations, 25 years after then-French President Jacques Chirac visited New Delhi as the Republic Day chief guest to launch a new strategic partnership with India.
Macron will be the sixth French leader accorded the honor of India’s chief guest on Republic Day and the fourth since 1998. His trip to New Delhi is an opportunity to showcase the relationship between the two countries, which shares similarities with some of India’s deep partnerships—while remaining quite distinct from India’s partnerships with other Western powers.
For nearly three decades, the India-France relationship has been largely free of tension, bringing to mind how Indian officials characterize India’s ties with Russia: as a “time-tested” partnership that has rarely if ever experienced a crisis. The arms trade between New Delhi and Paris is also strong, reminiscent of India’s partnerships with the United States and Israel. The three countries are India’s top arms suppliers after Russia—and France exported the most weapons to India between 2017 and 2021.
Much like India’s relations with the other members of the Quad (Australia, Japan, and the United States), its ties with France are strengthened by strategic convergences around geopolitics in Asia. India and France both view China’s growing regional influence with concern, and they each have island territories in the heart of the Indo-Pacific. Unsurprisingly, their strategic interests are now coalescing around the need for deeper engagement with the Pacific islands to balance China.
Finally, India-France relations have become increasingly multifaceted in recent years, with expanding cooperation in defense, renewable energy, science, and technology. This reflects a trend among India’s relations with the United States, the European Union, and Japan, among others. All these relationships can be classified as strategic partnerships—but they attained that status after Chirac’s visit to New Delhi in 1998.
There is much that sets the India-France relationship apart from New Delhi’s ties with other close Western partners. Both advocate for strategic autonomy, even if they each take different approaches. India’s strategic autonomy revolves around eschewing alliances, while France embraces alliances but still defies them when doing so serves its own interests. Their insistence on foreign-policy independence furthers common strategic goals. France, for example, aims to balance both U.S. and Chinese power in the Indo-Pacific, which India supports.
India has also achieved success with France on nuclear power cooperation, contrasting with New Delhi’s struggles to capitalize on a civil nuclear deal with Washington. Finally, France doesn’t typically criticize India about values-based issues such as human rights and democracy—unlike the United States or Canada. That allows France to avoid a prime trigger for tensions in the partnership.
Modi’s plan to bring the Quad leaders to India for Republic Day may have fallen through, but the consolation prize was another key partner with prime Pacific power—a testament to New Delhi’s convening clout, and to its status as a major global player with plenty of friends to choose from.