Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Another entry point to Europe? A provider of technology and defence equipment
enabling India to diversify, politically and strategically, her access to decisive
instruments of power? Or, on the longer run, a partnership founded on a partly
common reading of international relations?
The opening of a strategic dialogue with France in 1998 must be seen as a
testimony of a paradigmatic change in Indian foreign policy. Going beyond the old
privileged Russian connection, New Delhi, after asserting India's ambition
through nuclearization, had to develop a much more active multidirectional
diplomacy, a step to the high table India wishes to have access to, far different
from the Non-Aligned Movement or the G77 tradition.
The opening of Indian economy also had to be matched by the opening of her
geopolitical horizon. While the US entered a dialogue with India, focused on
what was seen in Washington as the negative impact of the tests, France offered
a very distinct, overarching perspective, much more open to India's expectations.
The opportunity was seized, and later on New Delhi entered in comprehensive
strategic dialogues with other relevant countries as well, after the consternation
about the test had receded.
Beyond the strict bilateral frame, the enhanced Indo-French relationship offers
therefore an opportunity to address much broader issues, which define the present
debate on what the global order should be, and which illustrate as well the Indian
quest for a higher status in the community of nations. Realpolitik is at play,
which is said to cultivate national interests. But it remains to be seen how
national interests call for adjustments to the evolving international chessboard.
THE BACKGROUND
It is something of a common joke in the fringes of Indo-French seminars to
remember, with a touch of false nostalgia, that if Dupleix had beaten Clive
during the Carnatic Wars of the eighteenth century, the French East India
Company would have taken the lead over its British competitor, Clive would not
have established himself as the new rising force in Bengal after the Battle of
Plassey (1757), and, to cut a long imagined story short, India would have today
French, and not English, as her lingua franca. Two centuries after Dupleix,
France handed over to India its colonial settlements (Pondicherry and additional
small remnants of empire), not too readily but gracefully enough on the whole
for keeping a foot there, with the approval of Pandit Nehru, who expected, so he
said, to see the former French port town to become 'India's window to Europe'. 1
Nothing of that sort happened. In the post-World War II context, France and
India choose different options. France's NATO membership was not in line with
India's non-alignment paradigm. Worse, its painful decolonization wars, in
Vietnam first, then in Algeria, put Paris on the wrong side of history. While the
leading figure of Nehru faded away after the Indo-Chinese war of 1962, before
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