Modi’s France visit made a resilient relationship stronger still
India-France ties have a special weave to them, if nothing else because both countries have the habit of being gadflies on the international scene. Like the Indians, the French have historically paid scant attention to their own limitations or weaknesses when promoting themselves on the world stage. France emerged bruised and battered from two world wars into a global political reality with radically altered power equations and rapid decolonising.
But well over a decade later, in the 1950s and early 1960s, the country was still hanging on to some of its colonies after having given up major ones such as Vietnam, Madagascar and Algeria at the cost of thousands of lives. So much for liberty, equality and fraternity. On the other side was newly independent India, with an uncompromising agenda of decolonisation for itself.
It managed to get the French to exit Pondicherry peacefully – and other nations in Asia and Africa. Despite being weakened by Partition and slow economic growth for decades, Indian diplomats did not shy away from standing up to both power blocs with ambitious ideas such as non-alignment. And yet, in the post-Cold War era, both France and India have been savvy enough to realise that they are useful partners in countering the overwhelming dominance of the United States.
In other words, the Indo-French relationship is a shared acknowledgement of their limitations in global politics and of the fact that together, they are more than the sum of their parts. It is not without reason, therefore, that France had the mildest response to India’s 1998 nuclear tests among the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. With Prime Minister Narendra Modi crafting a more ambitious global agenda for
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