India-EU Relations (PSIR Optional)

India and the European Union together hold close to two billion people and a quarter of world output. For twenty years that shared inventory produced summits, joint statements and a partnership labelled strategic that almost nobody described as strategic in practice. What changed was not the values but the arrival of pressures neither could manage alone — a coercive China, a war on Europe’s edge, and an American administration willing to tariff its friends. The relationship that emerged on 27 January 2026 is the first version with real content.

What kind of partner the European Union is

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The Union is not a state and does not behave like one, and almost every peculiarity of India’s dealings with it follows from that.

• The Union holds exclusive competence over the common commercial policy. Tariffs, trade agreements, customs and much of investment policy are negotiated by the European Commission on behalf of all twenty-seven member states, which cannot conclude trade deals of their own. On trade, Brussels is the only address.
• Foreign policy, defence and the armed forces remain national. The Common Foreign and Security Policy operates by unanimity, the Union has no army, and its member states buy weapons, sign defence agreements and deploy forces as sovereign governments. On security, Paris and Berlin are the addresses, not Brussels.
• Visas, work permits and professional qualifications are member-state competences. This is not a debating point but the reason two decades of Indian demands on the movement of professionals ran into a Commission that could only reply that the matter was not in its gift.
• This split competence is the whole explanation of India’s two-track European policy — a collective negotiation with the Union on trade, standards and technology, running alongside separate strategic partnerships with France, Germany, Italy and Britain on defence, nuclear energy and the Indian Ocean. India did not choose the arrangement; the Union’s constitutional design imposed it.

The mismatch runs deeper than competence. David Allen put it as a clash of political types: while the Union has sought to make the most of its post-Westphalian characteristics, India and almost every other established or emerging power remains firmly Westphalian in nature and outlook. A Union that has pooled sovereignty finds it natural to make agreements conditional on labour standards, carbon pricing and human-rights clauses; a state that spent two centuries losing sovereignty and one century recovering it reads conditionality as the old relationship in new clothes.

• Ummu Salma Bava locates the difficulty in the form itself: given the difference in the capability of states at the normative and material level, there is an inherent asymmetry in strategic partnerships, which signify that relationships are about power and interdependence rather than affinity.
  • Her prescription is the sentence the relationship has been trying to execute ever since — the ideational proximity between India and Europe has to be converted into interest convergence.
• Rajendra Jain records the Indian elite’s working image of Europe bluntly: a global economic giant that does not act as an independent and decisive actor, a normative power more interested in exporting standards than reforming the order, and a continent too fragmented to know who speaks for it. India’s complaint is not that Europe is weak but that Europe defends an order India wants changed.
• The Union’s China policy is the variable that most changes India’s prospects in Brussels. Europe’s formula calls China at once a partner, an economic competitor and a systemic rival. The Comprehensive Agreement on Investment of December 2020 was read in Delhi as Europe choosing market access over alignment; its freezing in 2021 over Xinjiang sanctions, and the de-risking that followed, created the space India now occupies.
• The Union’s own India policy was correspondingly slow to acquire an object. For most of the period covered below the Union treated India as a development case, then as a market, and only from 2018 as a political actor whose alignment mattered.

The long approach: from “non-associable” to strategic partner

The inheritance

• Nearly one million Indian soldiers served in the First World War and about two million in the Second, and they fought in Europe, in the Mediterranean and in North Africa at moments when the outcome was open. C. Raja Mohan’s formulation is that Indian soldiers saved Europe’s bacon twice in the last century, and he uses it to argue that Indian defence cooperation with Europe today is a resumption rather than an innovation.
• The Union itself was built out of the wreckage those soldiers were sent into.
  • Jean Monnet, usually called the father of Europe, proposed pooling sovereignty in supranational institutions as the only durable answer to Franco-German war, and the Treaty of Rome of 1957 created the European Economic Community alongside the European Coal and Steel Community and EURATOM.
  • What matters here is that India met the Community as a going concern from the start.
• India was among the very first states to establish relations with the EEC, in 1962, accrediting its first ambassador to the Community in 1963. Delhi took care to state that the new relationship would not be at the expense of its bilateral ties with Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy and Luxembourg — the two-track policy was present at the creation.

The Imperial Preference shock and the “non-associable” verdict

• Britain’s accession to the EEC in 1973 cost India the Imperial Preferences that had governed its trade with its largest single partner. A colonial commercial architecture that had outlived the empire collapsed at a stroke, and London itself told Delhi that a fresh relationship would have to be built with the Community rather than with Britain.
• India first tried for an Association Agreement, the instrument the Community used for its Mediterranean neighbours and later for the African, Caribbean and Pacific states, which offered a framework covering political, trade, social, cultural and security links. The Commission refused, classifying all South Asian states as “non-associable.”
• The word stung, and it is worth registering why. It placed India outside both categories the Community recognised — neither a European partner nor a post-colonial dependent worth privileged treatment — and it defined the relationship as one India would have to argue its way into. It took India a little over thirty years to travel from “non-associable” to “strategic partner”.

K. B. Lall and the commercial route

• K. B. Lall, India’s ambassador to the EEC, devised the alternative. Rather than seek association, he took the Community’s Generalised System of Preferences as a floor and added to it the dimensions of trade development and trade promotion, producing the Commercial Cooperation Agreement of 1973.
• Its founding premise was sovereign equality, and it was drafted so as not to cut across India’s bilateral relations with member states. The design decision made in 1973 is the design decision India still operates.
• The agreement was widened repeatedly — through the five-year Commercial and Economic Cooperation Agreement of 1981, and by 1993 to cover economic cooperation and investment. The India–EEC Trade Centre was set up in the early 1980s to push Indian exports, and the European Commission Delegation opened in New Delhi in 1983.
• Europe was already India’s largest economic partner in this period, and by a wide margin.
  • In 1984, the Community supplied 23 per cent of Indian imports against 10 per cent from the United States, 7 per cent from Japan and 6 per cent from the Soviet Union; it took 20 per cent of Indian exports against 24 per cent for the United States.
  • The economic relationship was substantial long before the political one existed.

The 1994 Agreement and the post-Cold War reset

• The Cooperation Agreement on Partnership and Development of 1994 remains the legal basis of the relationship, and it did what the 1973 instrument could not: it took the relationship past trade into a political register, acknowledging India’s role in South Asia and treating economic liberalisation as a trend Europe should support.
• It was made possible by two simultaneous changes — the disappearance of the Soviet Union removed the ideological distance that had made India a suspect interlocutor in several European capitals, and the reforms of 1991 gave European business a reason to want access.
• A Joint Political Statement had preceded it in 1993, and together the two documents established the pattern of a political declaration paired with a legal agreement that the relationship has followed ever since.

1998 and the normative rupture

• The nuclear tests of May 1998 produced sharp European condemnation. For a period the Union endorsed the American view that the subcontinent had become the most dangerous place on earth, and European statements on non-proliferation acquired a tone Indian officials remember.
• Allen read the episode as a collision of political cultures: India’s jettisoning of moralpolitik in favour of realpolitik provoked European disapproval and, in return, disdain in India for the Union. The tests did not damage trade; they damaged the assumption of shared normative ground, and that assumption has never been fully restored.
• The contrast with France is the point of the story. France declined to join the condemnation, and the strategic partnership signed in January 1998 survived Pokhran II intact — the founding fact of the bilateral relationship treated further below.

The summit era and the long drift, 2000–2020

Lisbon 2000 and The Hague 2004

• The first India–EU Summit was held at Lisbon in June 2000 and mattered less for its content than for the fact of it: all member states agreed to engage India politically, at the top, on a recurring basis.
• The fifth summit, at The Hague in 2004, created the Strategic Partnership. The Union has a small number of such partnerships and India’s was among the earliest outside the Western alliance system. It rested explicitly on future potential rather than on existing substance — a candid basis, and one that would be held against the relationship for twenty years.
• The sixth summit, in New Delhi in 2005, adopted the Joint Action Plan, which set out the machinery: strengthened dialogue and consultation mechanisms, deeper political dialogue and cooperation, and enhanced economic policy dialogue. The ninth summit of 2008 reviewed and revised it, adding some forty new elements.
• The architecture proliferated faster than the substance. By the mid-2010s the partnership carried well over thirty dialogue mechanisms covering trade, energy, migration, non-proliferation, counter-terrorism and cyber security. Meetings multiplied; decisions did not.

Why the relationship drifted, 2012–2016

Between the 2012 summit and 2016 there was no summit at all — the longest gap in the relationship’s history — and the reasons are worth setting out individually, because each of them recurs.

• The most quoted expression of the mood belongs to Raja Mohan, who wrote that the Union’s post-modern orientation is in essence a convenient escape from confronting emerging challenges, and that many in India therefore considered themselves tied down in a loveless arranged marriage with Europe.
• Indian complaints of the period had a consistent shape: that Europe brought complaints about climate and human rights rather than proposals; that there was no commitment at the top; and that Europe, unlike the United States, did not persist. The counterpart European complaint was that India was a slow, protectionist and unrewarding negotiating partner.

The turn back, 2016–2020

• The Brussels summit of 2016 and the New Delhi summit of 2017 restarted the mechanism and produced an Agenda for Action 2020, but the trade negotiation stayed frozen.
• The EU Strategy on India of 2018 — “A Partnership for Sustainable Modernisation and a Rules-Based Global Order” — is the hinge document on the European side.
  • For the first time the Union described India as an emerging global power with a key role in a multipolar world and a factor of stability in a complex region, and called explicitly for greater political, security and defence cooperation.
  • Europe had stopped treating India as a market.
• The fifteenth summit, held virtually in July 2020, produced the most substantive package to that date.
  • The India–EU Strategic Partnership: A Roadmap to 2025, the framing document for the next five years.
  • The India–EURATOM Agreement on research in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and renewal of the Science and Technology Agreement.
  • A Joint Declaration on Resource Efficiency and Circular Economy, a ministerial High Level Dialogue on trade and investment, and European Investment Bank commitments of €550 million to the Pune and Bhopal metro projects.
• The non-governmental layer is older than the strategic one and is rarely counted. The India Window to Erasmus Mundus ran from 2009 to 2013 and Erasmus+ succeeded it; Union funds have supported Indian state programmes in health and education; and the India–EU Round Table for Civil Society Interaction is a forum India maintains with no other partner, alongside direct parliamentary contact.
• The 2020 summit also fixed the vocabulary the relationship now uses — effective multilateralism, a rules-based order with the United Nations and the World Trade Organization at its core, and cooperation as the world’s two largest democracies.
• The gap between the language and the practice is the period’s defining feature. At the Helsinki summit of 2006 Manmohan Singh had already called the two natural partners; twenty years of commentary nevertheless described the partnership as lukewarm and reluctant, and the description was fair.

“India and the EU are natural partners as we share common values of democracy, pluralism and the rule of law.”

— Manmohan Singh

The reconstruction, 2021–2025

Porto, 8 May 2021

• The Porto meeting brought Modi together with all twenty-seven heads of state and government, in the format the Union reserves for its own European Council — a signal that India was a whole-of-Union interest, not a Commission file.
• It is a Leaders’ Meeting, not a numbered summit, and the distinction matters because reference material routinely misdescribes it as the sixteenth summit. The sixteenth summit was held in New Delhi on 27 January 2026.
• Its substantive achievement was the relaunch of the trade negotiation after eight years, on three tracks — a free trade agreement, a standalone investment protection agreement, and one on geographical indications. Splitting investment from trade was the technical fix that made a restart possible.
• It also launched the India–EU Connectivity Partnership, the Union’s second such partnership after the one agreed with Japan in September 2019, resting on transparency, viability, debt sustainability and respect for sovereignty — language written with the Belt and Road in view and closely matching India’s own.

Europe becomes an Indo-Pacific actor

• The EU Strategy for Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, adopted in September 2021, is the document that made a security relationship conceivable. It committed the Union to a maritime presence, capacity building and partnerships across a region it had previously treated as somebody else’s, and it named India as a priority partner.
• The maritime cooperation that followed is modest in scale and large in significance.
  • The first India–EU joint naval exercise was held in the Gulf of Aden in June 2021 with Operation Atalanta, the Union’s counter-piracy mission.
  • A second followed in the Gulf of Guinea in October 2023 and a third in the Indian Ocean in June 2025, with a Sea Joint Activity in the Gulf of Oman in August 2022 involving INS Chennai and INS Kochi.
  • The two navies have also jointly escorted World Food Programme shipping — humanitarian work that builds the habits interoperability requires.
• Two European programmes carry the practical work: CRIMARIO, which builds maritime information-sharing across the Indian Ocean, and ESIWA, the Union’s security and defence cooperation instrument for Asia, under which counter-terrorism, cyber and maritime training with India is funded.
• The EU Political and Security Committee made its first-ever visit to Asia in September 2025, coming to India — a procedural detail that indicates how recently the Union’s security machinery began treating India as an interlocutor.

The Trade and Technology Council

• The decision to create an EU–India Trade and Technology Council was announced in April 2022 by Modi and Ursula von der Leyen, and the Council was launched in February 2023. It was the Union’s second such body anywhere, after the one with the United States, and remains one of only a handful.
• It works through three working groups — strategic technologies, digital governance and digital connectivity; green and clean energy technologies; and resilient value chains, trade and investment.
• Its declared purpose is de-risking on both sides at once: reducing the Union’s dependence on China and India’s dependence on Russia, which is why analysts read the Council as an instrument of mutual strategic autonomy rather than a trade body.
• Its record is the weakest part of the new architecture. Garima Mohan identifies reform of an underperforming Council as one of the outstanding tasks of the relationship, and the criticism is that it has generated working groups faster than deliverables.

The College of Commissioners in Delhi, February 2025

• Von der Leyen brought the entire College of Commissioners to New Delhi on 27–28 February 2025 — the first time the Commission had travelled as a body to any partner outside Europe, and the first such visit in the history of the relationship.
• The leaders’ statement committed both sides to conclude the trade agreement within the year, tasked officials on investment protection and geographical indications, welcomed a semiconductor memorandum of understanding, and — the sentence that mattered most — agreed to explore a security and defence partnership.
• The visit is the moment the political will became visible. Everything adopted eleven months later at the summit was set in motion here.

What the tariff shock did

Whether the tariff threats of 2025 pushed India and the Union together is the question the relationship’s current shape turns on. The honest answer has three parts.

• The evidence that they did. Both faced the same American instrument in the same year; both were seeking supply-chain diversification away from China; and a negotiation that had failed for eighteen years concluded within twelve months of the pressure arriving. Political will, not new economics, is what changed.
• The evidence that they did not. Nothing about the substantive disagreements — agriculture and dairy, carbon pricing, data adequacy, intellectual property — was altered by an external tariff. A convergence produced by a shared irritant is thinner than one produced by a shared interest, and it can dissolve when the irritant does.
• The resolution. External pressure raised the political price of failure high enough to force decisions that officials had been able to postpone for a decade, and those decisions are now embedded in a treaty text that will outlast the pressure.
  • The tariff explains the timing; it does not explain the content. Whether the partnership is durable will be tested the first time Europe and India disagree without an American tariff in the room.

The sixteenth summit, New Delhi, 27 January 2026

• António Costa, President of the European Council, and Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, were chief guests at the seventy-seventh Republic Day parade on 26 January 2026 — the first time European Union leaders have held that place, and the first time a contingent of the EU Military Staff has marched at Rajpath. The summit followed the next day.
• The summit adopted more in a single day than the previous fifteen had adopted between them, and the density of the package is itself the evidence for the claim that the relationship changed character.

• The Joint Comprehensive Strategic Agenda is the framing document and organises the relationship on five pillars — prosperity and sustainability; technology and innovation; security and defence; connectivity and global challenges; and enablers. Its significance is that security is now a pillar rather than a paragraph.
• Connectivity was given content rather than restated: support for IMEC, an EU–Africa–India Digital Corridor within it, the Blue Raman submarine cable as a secure data route between India and Europe that avoids existing chokepoints, and green shipping corridors. The Union’s Global Gateway and India’s MAHASAGAR framework were named together.
• India’s Indo-Pacific instruments were adopted into the text — joint activity under the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative, cooperation through the Indian Ocean Rim Association under India’s chairship, an inaugural India–EU Consultation on the Indo-Pacific, and enhanced European engagement with the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure and the International Solar Alliance.
• A Track 1.5 India–EU Forum and an India–EU Business Forum were established and the AI Impact Summit of 19–20 February 2026 folded into the agenda — the sub-official layer that durable partnerships run on, present for the first time.

The Free Trade Agreement

Eighteen years of failure

• Negotiations opened in 2007 as a Broad-based Trade and Investment Agreement, ran through sixteen rounds, and were suspended in 2013 with no formal breakdown announced — the talks simply stopped being scheduled.
• The disagreements were specific and they were symmetrical. Each side wanted precisely what the other’s domestic politics forbade.

• The Indian government’s own assessment at the time was that India would be a net loser on goods because of tariff revenue foregone, with gains expected only from services liberalisation. A study by the University of Sussex with CUTS International similarly found the welfare effects of goods liberalisation ambiguous. Indian reluctance was not merely political.

The relaunch and the endgame

• Talks resumed in June 2022 on the three-track design agreed at Porto, and India and the Union set an end-2025 target at the February 2025 leaders’ meeting. Negotiations closed on 27 January 2026 with agreement on the great majority of chapters. Piyush Goyal called it “the mother of all deals”.
• The scale is the first fact: two markets of roughly $27 trillion and two billion people, close to a quarter of world output, and the largest bilateral trade agreement either side has concluded.

What the agreement does

• The Union eliminates tariffs on about 90 per cent of Indian goods on entry into force, rising to roughly 93 per cent over seven years; more than 99 per cent of Indian exports by value obtain preferential entry, covering about 97 per cent of EU tariff lines.
• India removes tariffs on about 30 per cent of EU goods immediately, with around 96.6 per cent of EU exports eventually facing eliminated or reduced duties. Roughly 99.5 per cent of bilateral trade receives some concession. The asymmetry in the immediate schedules is real and deliberate: India phases, the Union front-loads.
• India’s gains are concentrated where its employment is. EU duties of 12–17 per cent on textiles, apparel, leather and footwear go to zero, ending the disadvantage Indian exporters had faced against Bangladesh, Vietnam and Turkey, which enjoy preferential or duty-free access. About $33 billion of labour-intensive exports — textiles, leather, marine products, gems and jewellery, handicrafts, engineering goods — move to zero duty.
• Services access is the structural win. India obtains commitments across 144 sub-sectors including IT and IT-enabled services, professional, financial, education and construction services, against 102 sub-sectors for the Union.
• Mobility appears in a trade agreement for the first time in this relationship: intra-corporate transferees with dependants, business visitors, contractual service suppliers in 37 sectors, independent professionals in 17 sectors, student mobility with post-study work, access for practitioners of Indian traditional medicine, and a framework to conclude social security agreements over five years.
• What India conceded is mostly industrial. Duties disappear on EU machinery (previously up to 44 per cent), chemicals (22 per cent), pharmaceuticals (11 per cent), medical devices, optical equipment, aircraft, olive oil and processed foods.
  • Car tariffs fall from up to 110 per cent to 40 per cent in stages, under a quota confined to roughly 250,000 vehicles a year, with deeper cuts for higher-value models over time.
  • Spirits duties fall to 40 per cent.
• What India protected is agricultural. Dairy, cereals, poultry, soymeal and a list of sensitive fruits and vegetables were excluded, and the Union kept its own exclusions on Indian beef, sugar, rice and poultry, offering quota access on items such as sheepmeat and grapes. Both sides protected their farmers; neither pretends otherwise.
• CBAM was not surrendered. The agreement leaves the carbon border measure intact and substitutes cooperation for exemption: a most-favoured-nation assurance extending to India any flexibility granted to a third country, technical cooperation on recognition of carbon pricing, and a dialogue. India did not obtain what it asked for.

The assessment

• The modelled gains are real and modest. Independent estimates put the permanent gain at roughly 0.12 per cent of GDP for India and 0.13 per cent for the Union, with Indian exports to the Union rising about 41 per cent and EU exports to India about 65 per cent, the larger European increase reflecting the higher tariffs India is dismantling.
  • Chinese exports to India are projected to fall by 5.5 to 8.9 per cent — de-risking by market means.
• The sharpest Indian critique, made by Biswajit Dhar among others, is that the tariff schedule is the easy part. The binding constraint is the non-tariff layer — environmental, labour and sustainability compliance, plant-variety protection rules that conflict with India’s farmer-friendly sui generis system, and CBAM reporting — and those costs fall hardest on the micro, small and medium enterprises the agreement is supposed to help.
• Climate specialists add that the sustainability chapter’s enforcement is weak, which cuts both ways: it limits the conditionality India objected to, and it also means the environmental promises are largely aspirational.
• The agreement is concluded, not in force. It requires legal scrubbing and translation, approval by the Council of the European Union, consent of the European Parliament, and clearance by India’s Union Cabinet. Entry into force is not expected before 2027, and the European Parliament’s consent is a genuine political variable, not a formality.

The economic relationship in figures

• Trade in goods stood at €118.4 billion in 2025 — EU imports from India €69.5 billion against EU exports to India €48.9 billion, leaving India with a surplus in goods. Trade in services reached €67 billion — €37.9 billion of Indian services exports against €29.3 billion the other way.
• Growth has been steady rather than spectacular: goods trade up about 84 per cent over the decade, services trade up roughly 190 per cent, which is where the momentum is.
• The Union is India’s largest single source of foreign direct investment, with a stock of €132 billion in 2024. Over 6,000 European companies operate in India, providing directly around three million jobs. Indian investment into Europe is much smaller but no longer negligible.
• Ranks must always be stated with their basis, because the two sides count differently.
  • On the Union’s 2025 figures the EU as a bloc is India’s second-largest trading partner after the United States, ahead of China, at about 11.6 per cent of India’s trade.
  • On India’s merchandise accounting the Union is India’s largest goods partner, at about $136 billion in 2024-25.
  • On India’s FY2025-26 figures China is India’s largest single-country partner. All three are true of different measures.
• The comparison that gives the Union its leverage is with the past: India–EU trade was about €4.4 billion in 1980 and €60.9 billion in 2008. The relationship’s economic weight has never been in doubt; its political weight has.

The live irritants

The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism

• CBAM entered its definitive phase on 1 January 2026, requiring importers into the Union to surrender certificates matching the embedded emissions of goods in six sectors — steel, aluminium, cement, fertiliser, electricity and hydrogen — priced against the EU Emissions Trading System.
• India’s exposure is concentrated and material. Steel and aluminium are a substantial share of Indian merchandise exports to the Union, and Indian production is more carbon-intensive than the European average because the grid is coal-heavy.
• India’s objection is doctrinal before it is commercial. New Delhi treats CBAM as a unilateral trade measure dressed as climate policy, inconsistent with common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities under the climate regime, and with the principle that mitigation obligations track historical responsibility. India has argued the point in the WTO and in the BASIC grouping with Brazil, South Africa and China, and has raised the possibility of rebalancing measures.
• India’s constructive response is domestic. The Carbon Credit Trading Scheme creates a domestic carbon price that could in principle be recognised against CBAM liability, which is exactly what the trade agreement’s technical cooperation clause anticipates. The dispute has been converted into a negotiation, which is progress, and not into a settlement, which it is not.

The other regulatory frictions

• The EU Deforestation Regulation requires proof that imported coffee, cocoa, rubber, timber, soya, palm oil and cattle products are not linked to land cleared after 2020. It bears heavily on Indian coffee and rubber, grown overwhelmingly by smallholders who cannot easily produce geolocation records. Its application has been postponed twice and now falls due at the end of December 2026, with simplifications — a reprieve rather than a resolution.
• The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive extends European liability up the supply chain to Indian suppliers, making a European buyer answerable for labour and environmental conditions in Indian factories. India’s objection is that European standards are being made binding on Indian firms without Indian consent.
• The everyday frictions are regulatory rather than tariff-based and run both ways. Europe objects to India’s registration requirement for fifteen categories of IT and consumer electronics and to in-country testing of telecom equipment; India objects to European sanitary rules, of which the ban on Alphonso mangoes in May 2014, lifted in 2015, is the remembered episode.
• Data adequacy remains unresolved. India has never been recognised as data-secure under Union law. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 was expected to close the gap, but its provisions on state exemptions and the absence, for a long period, of implementing rules have kept an adequacy decision out of reach. Without it, Indian IT firms carry costs their competitors do not.
• The pharmaceutical dispute has a formative episode behind it.
  • Between 2008 and 2010, Dutch and other European customs authorities repeatedly seized consignments of Indian generic medicines in transit to Latin America and Africa, on patent grounds that applied in neither the origin nor the destination country.
  • India requested WTO consultations against the European Union and the Netherlands in May 2010, with Brazil, Canada, China, Ecuador, Japan and Turkey joining; the dispute was settled by an understanding on transit in 2011.
  • It established in Indian minds the proposition that European intellectual-property enforcement can interrupt the global supply of affordable medicines — the anxiety that shaped every later Indian position on patents.
• European sanctions now reach Indian commerce directly.
  • The Union’s eighteenth sanctions package of 18 July 2025 listed Nayara Energy, the Gujarat refinery in which Rosneft holds a large stake, and banned imports into the Union of refined products made from Russian crude.
  • The second measure is aimed at Indian refining generally, since Reliance’s Jamnagar complex sends a substantial share of its output to Europe.
  • India’s Ministry of External Affairs replied that India does not subscribe to unilateral sanctions and that there must be no double standards on energy trade.
  • This is the sharpest live contradiction in the relationship: the Union signed a security partnership in January and sanctions Indian refiners for buying oil Europe itself bought until 2022.
• Parliamentary resolutions remain a recurring irritant. The European Parliament has debated and moved resolutions on Kashmir and, in January 2020, on the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, drawing a public Indian objection that a foreign legislature has no business legislating on Indian law. That they are non-binding does not reduce the political effect in India — and the Parliament’s consent is now required for the trade agreement, which gives the friction real consequences.

The security and defence turn

• The India–EU Security and Defence Partnership was signed in New Delhi on 27 January 2026 by High Representative Kaja Kallas and External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar. It is the first framework covering the whole of the security relationship rather than a single strand of it.
• Its scope is unusually wide for a first instrument, running to some fourteen areas.
  • Maritime security, counter-terrorism and preventing violent extremism, and the external dimension of organised crime.
  • Cyber, artificial intelligence and emerging technologies, hybrid threats and critical infrastructure protection.
  • Space security and defence, non-proliferation and disarmament, and multilateral coordination.
  • Defence industry cooperation, capacity building for partner states, situational awareness and information exchange, and women, peace and security, with training, education and consular cooperation alongside.
• Its place in the Union’s own practice should be stated accurately.
  • It is one of a series begun in 2024 — Moldova and Norway, then Japan, South Korea, North Macedonia and Albania in November 2024, the United Kingdom in May 2025, Canada in June 2025, and after India, Iceland, Australia and Ghana in March 2026.
  • India is therefore not the Union’s first Indo-Pacific security partner; Japan and South Korea preceded it.
  • What is distinctive is that India is the first such partner that is neither a European neighbour, nor an accession candidate, nor a treaty ally — the first Europe has taken on terms of strategic autonomy rather than alignment.
  • Kaja Kallas framed the partnership as making security a core part of the relationship rather than an adjunct to it — the first time an EU foreign policy chief has described India in those terms.
• Implementation began quickly. The first India–EU Security and Defence Dialogue was held in New Delhi on 6 March 2026, upgrading the previous annual consultations, and covered Ukraine, West Asia, Iran and the Indo-Pacific alongside maritime security, counter-terrorism, cyber, non-proliferation and space. Both sides committed to advance a Security of Information Agreement, without which classified exchange is impossible and the partnership stays declaratory.
• A Defence Industry Forum was created at the summit, and the defence-industrial question is the real test.
  • European rearmament instruments — the SAFE loan facility and Readiness 2030 — are built around European supply chains, and whether Indian industry can enter them, or European firms manufacture in India, will decide whether this is a partnership or a dialogue.
  • Airbus’s helicopter line in Karnataka is the model that would have to multiply.
• Europe has begun treating India as a security actor rather than a market. For fifty years the Union’s India policy was commercial, the 2018 Strategy made it political, and 2026 made it, on paper, strategic. Garima Mohan’s observation is the sharpest: the partnership works precisely because it routes around the disagreement over Russia rather than resolving it.

Europe beyond Brussels

The Union has limited competence in politics and security, and its size makes it slow. India’s answer has been to build the political and military relationship with capitals and the economic one with Brussels. The bilateral relationships, and above all the French one, have delivered more than the collective relationship for most of three decades.

France: the deepest bilateral

• India and France established a strategic partnership on 26 January 1998 — India’s first with any Western power, and France’s first with any non-Western state.
  • Four months later India tested at Pokhran.
  • France declined to join the condemnation and did not impose sanctions, and that refusal is the founding fact of the relationship: France demonstrated that it would treat India as a state with interests rather than as a problem in non-proliferation.
• The relationship has been formally upgraded twice. The Horizon 2047 roadmap, adopted during Modi’s Bastille Day visit of July 2023, set a twenty-five-year agenda running to the centenary of independence and of diplomatic relations.
  • Macron was chief guest at Republic Day 2024, and during his visit of 17–19 February 2026, when he also attended the AI Impact Summit, the partnership was raised to a Special Global Strategic Partnership with agreements on defence industry, critical minerals and innovation.
• Defence is the substance of the relationship, and it is the only European relationship in which India buys frontline combat capability.
  • Thirty-six Rafale fighters were contracted in 2016 and delivered by 2022; twenty-six Rafale-M aircraft for the Navy were signed on 28 April 2025 at roughly €6.6 billion, with technology transfer and maintenance facilities in India.
  • The Scorpène / Project 75 submarine line at Mazagon Dock delivered its sixth boat in January 2025, with three further hulls contracted.
  • Safran and DRDO are cooperating on the engine for the Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft — the most sensitive technology any partner has offered India — and Safran opened an engine services facility near Hyderabad in November 2025.
  • A ten-year defence cooperation agreement was renewed at the Annual Defence Dialogue in Bengaluru on 17 February 2026.
• The exercise calendar covers all three services — Varuna at sea, Garuda in the air, Shakti on land, with La Pérouse and Milan as the multilateral formats — and a reciprocal logistics agreement of 2018 and a White Shipping Agreement give each navy access to the other’s facilities and maritime picture.
• Nuclear and space cooperation predate all of this. Jaitapur, the world’s largest planned nuclear plant by capacity, is stalled on price and liability rather than politics, and a letter of intent on small modular reactors followed in February 2025. ISRO and CNES have cooperated for over fifty years, currently on the TRISHNA earth-observation mission and maritime domain awareness from space.
• France is the only European state with a permanent presence in the Indian Ocean. Réunion and Mayotte are French territory, roughly 1.5 million French citizens live in the region, and France maintains forces at Djibouti, in the Emirates and on Réunion. This is what makes France a resident Indo-Pacific power rather than a visiting one, and it is the basis of the India–France–UAE and India–France–Australia trilaterals.
• France co-founded the International Solar Alliance with India in 2015 on the margins of the Paris climate conference — the only major international organisation India has created, and evidence that the two can build institutions together rather than merely trade.
• France supports India’s permanent membership of the Security Council and its entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group without the qualifications other partners attach.
• The proposition that “France can be the new Russia” deserves testing rather than repetition.
  • For it: France supplies advanced platforms with technology transfer, does not attach political conditions, holds a veto, and unlike Russia is not deepening a dependency on China.
  • Against it: the trade relationship is modest — bilateral trade of about €13.6 billion in 2025-26, with France only India’s eleventh-largest investor at just over €10 billion cumulative; French equipment is expensive and supplied in small numbers where Russia supplied volume; France has never offered the spares-and-licence ecosystem that made Soviet equipment affordable; and France, unlike Russia, is a European Union member subject to the Union’s trade and carbon rules.
  • The verdict: France is a better partner than Russia and a smaller one, and the substitution is qualitative rather than arithmetical.

The United Kingdom and Brexit

The exit

• The referendum of 23 June 2016 produced 51.9 per cent for Leave against 48.1 per cent for Remain. The Leave case rested on recovering sovereignty from the Union’s legal system, ending the budgetary contribution, controlling immigration and borders, escaping what campaigners called burdensome regulation, and regaining an independent trade policy. The Remain case rested on jobs, trade and the argument that Britain was stronger and safer inside.
• Britain had joined the Community in 1973 and had always been the most Eurosceptic large member — outside the euro and outside Schengen. It left the Union on 31 January 2020, with a transition period running to 31 December 2020, and the two concluded a Trade and Cooperation Agreement.
• The settlement left loose ends that have shaped the decade: no equivalence on financial services, no early adequacy on data sharing, a time-limited fisheries arrangement, customs paperwork and border delay, level-playing-field commitments constraining divergence, and a distinct regime for Northern Ireland, which follows Union rules on goods so the land border stays open, with checks instead on goods from Great Britain.

Consequences for the world economy, and for India

• For the world economy the immediate effects were monetary and financial — a sharp depreciation of sterling, a repricing of European risk, the partial relocation of euro-denominated clearing and banking from the City of London to Frankfurt, Paris, Dublin and Amsterdam, and the demonstration that regional integration is reversible.

• The counter-argument is the one that has been vindicated. Brexit freed Britain to conclude a bilateral agreement with India that it could not have negotiated as a member, because trade competence sat in Brussels. The concrete post-Brexit payoff for India is not a loss but a treaty.

The rebuilt bilateral

• The 2030 Roadmap of May 2021 upgraded the relationship to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and was accompanied by a Migration and Mobility Partnership providing legal routes alongside a return mechanism for irregular migrants — the trade of a British concession on mobility for an Indian concession on readmission.
• The India–UK Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement was signed in London on 24 July 2025 and entered into force on 15 July 2026, alongside India–UK Vision 2035, adopted the same day, which organises the relationship on growth, technology, defence and security, climate, education and people-to-people links.
• CETA’s terms are substantial. About 99 per cent of Indian exports enter Britain duty-free or at reduced rates, textiles, leather, gems and marine products gaining most; India opened 89.5 per cent of its tariff lines, covering about 91 per cent of British exports, with phased cuts on Scotch whisky, cars and machinery. Estimates put the eventual gain at about £25.5 billion of extra trade on a base of $56 billion.
• The accompanying Double Contribution Convention, signed 10 February 2026, is the sleeper provision. It exempts temporary Indian workers and their employers from UK National Insurance contributions for up to five years — a double payment that had cost some 75,000 professionals dearly. It is precisely the Mode 4 gain the Union could not deliver.
• Vision 2035 carries the security content: a ten-year Defence Industrial Roadmap, the Electric Propulsion Capability Partnership for Indian warships, Jet Engine Advanced Core Technologies cooperation, a Regional Maritime Security Centre of Excellence, the UK–India Technology Security Initiative of 2024, a Joint Centre for AI, and a critical-minerals guild.
• The frictions are political rather than commercial.
  • Kashmir remains a live issue in British constituency politics because of the size and geography of the South Asian diaspora.
  • Khalistani activism, including the 2023 attack on India’s High Commission in London, has produced repeated Indian protests about the limits of British policing of extremist speech.
  • The extradition of Nirav Modi and Vijay Mallya has crawled through British courts for years — reluctance to India, due process to Britain.
• Raja Mohan’s assessment is that the relationship has moved from “entrenched pessimism” to “expansive new possibilities” — pragmatism driven by advantage in trade, technology and defence, and enabled by two external shifts: American support for India’s rise, which changed British calculations, and the American turn against China, which produced Britain’s Indo-Pacific tilt.
• One structural difference from France and the United States remains. Both now place India first in their South Asia policy; Britain still balances its enthusiasm for India against its historical relationship with Pakistan, a legacy of partition, Commonwealth ties and domestic constituency, which India expects Pakistan’s declining weight to erode. The diaspora is both the relationship’s largest asset and its most reliable source of friction.

Germany: the economic anchor

• Germany is India’s largest trading partner within the Union and accounts for more than a quarter of India’s trade with the bloc; bilateral trade in goods and services passed $50 billion in 2024. Roughly 2,000 German companies operate in India.
• The Intergovernmental Consultations mechanism, created in 2011, is the reason the relationship works. It brings whole cabinets together, chaired by the Chancellor and the Prime Minister, so that ministries negotiate directly rather than through foreign offices. India has this format with very few states. The seventh round was held in New Delhi on 25 October 2024.
• The Green and Sustainable Development Partnership, agreed in 2022, carries a German commitment of €10 billion to 2030 for renewable energy, urban mobility and climate adaptation, of which roughly half has been committed since.
• Germany’s “Focus on India” strategy, adopted in October 2024, is the country-level analogue of the Union’s 2018 India strategy and includes the decision that raised the annual visa quota for skilled Indian workers from 20,000 to 90,000 — the largest single mobility concession any European state has made to India.
• Chancellor Friedrich Merz visited India on 12–13 January 2026, his first visit to Asia in office and a deliberate signal ahead of the summit.
  • On defence it produced a Defence Industrial Cooperation Roadmap, a Reciprocal Logistics Support Agreement, a DRDO–Bundeswehr knowledge exchange, and a German liaison officer at the Information Fusion Centre – Indian Ocean Region.
  • On technology and people it produced declarations on semiconductors, critical minerals and telecommunications, a Global Skills Partnership, and visa-free transit through Germany for Indian passport holders.
• The submarine question is the open one. The German bid for India’s P-75I conventional submarine programme, in partnership with Mazagon Dock, has been under negotiation for years and would be the largest defence transaction between the two.
• The mutual irritations are real and mild. Germany was until 2022 the European state most entangled with Russia and is, in Indian eyes, poorly placed to lecture; Berlin finds India’s Russia policy hard to explain to a public paying for Zeitenwende. Neither has let the disagreement touch the economic relationship.

Italy, the Nordics and the rest of Europe

• Italy’s relationship recovered from near-collapse. The case of the two Italian marines, charged over the killing of Kerala fishermen in 2012, froze it for most of a decade until arbitration and compensation closed the matter.
  • The Joint Strategic Action Plan 2025–2029 rebuilt it, and the partnership was raised to a Special Strategic Partnership in 2026.
  • It carries a Defence Industrial Roadmap on helicopters, naval platforms and electronic warfare, a critical minerals memorandum on recovery from e-waste, a trade target of €20 billion by 2029, and mobility arrangements for Indian nurses. Italy is India’s most committed European partner on IMEC.
• The Nordic relationship is conducted collectively. The India–Nordic Summit format — Stockholm 2018, Copenhagen 2022 — brings Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden together with India on green technology, maritime innovation and the Arctic, and is one of very few summit formats India holds with a sub-regional grouping. India also engages the Nordic–Baltic Eight as a bloc.
• The India–EFTA Trade and Economic Partnership Agreement, signed 10 March 2024 and in force from 1 October 2025, covers Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein — states outside the Union — and carries an unprecedented commitment to mobilise $100 billion of investment in India over fifteen years with a target of one million direct jobs. It is the first Indian trade agreement to bind a partner to an investment obligation.
• Central, Eastern and Southern Europe is the growth area of Indian diplomacy. Poland, Greece, Cyprus, Austria and the Czech Republic have all received high-level Indian visits since 2023 after decades of neglect.
  • The logic is procedural: the Union decides by consensus and small member states hold vetoes, so a bloc-level agreement requires bilateral relationships India had not built.
  • The Ukraine war has divided Europe internally on Russia, and Warsaw and Vilnius read India’s position very differently from Rome or Budapest.

IMEC

• The India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor was announced at the New Delhi G20 on 9 September 2023 by India, the United States, the Union, France, Germany, Italy, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
• It has two legs — an eastern corridor from India to the Gulf and a northern corridor from the Gulf through Jordan and Israel to Europe — combining shipping, rail, an electricity interconnector, a hydrogen pipeline and data cables.
• It is Europe’s largest connectivity stake in India and the Global Gateway answer to the Belt and Road, claiming transparency, debt sustainability and consultation rather than scale.
• Progress has been slowed by the war in Gaza since October 2023, which suspended the Israeli–Saudi normalisation the northern leg assumed. An India–UAE framework agreement followed in February 2024, work has begun at the Gulf end, and the first ministerial was set for 2026.
• It is real, it is behind schedule, and the delay is caused by third-country conditions rather than by Indian or European capacity.

The scholarly assessment

• Raja Mohan is the most useful guide because he has argued both sides: his earlier verdict was the loveless arranged marriage, his current one that Europe is looming larger than ever in India’s strategic calculus.
  • His historical explanation runs in three phases. In the colonial age India saw Europe through British eyes, and the Great Game was about keeping Britain’s European rivals out of the subcontinent.
  • After independence India flipped the paradigm, aligning with Russia to limit European influence in the region.
  • After Ukraine a third paradigm is available — commercial and security partnerships with Europe that stand on their own merit.

“Europe has to grow out of mindset that its problems are world’s problems.”

— S. Jaishankar

• Jaishankar’s public position pairs an insistence that Europe is truly a priority for India with the sharpest available criticism of European provincialism. His constructive formulation is that Europe and India can strengthen each other’s strategic autonomy by reducing dependencies, cooperating on critical technologies and restructuring supply chains — which is the argument that turned the trade agreement from a commercial file into a strategic one.
• Ummu Salma Bava’s asymmetry thesis remains the best diagnostic: shared values do not by themselves generate shared interests. Rajendra Jain supplies the Indian scepticism — a normative Europe defending an order India wants reformed — and Richard Gowan’s counter is the plain one, that India and Europe still need each other whatever they think of each other.
• Frédéric Grare offers the sharpest European self-criticism: European capitals refuse to see that a more confrontational Indian posture toward Russia would weaken India against China, and so misread as sympathy for Moscow what is a calculation about Beijing. His prescription — accept the caution, support gradual decoupling, do not isolate — is close to the policy the Union adopted in 2026.
• Garima Mohan identifies what remains undone: ratification through the European Parliament, reform of the Trade and Technology Council, clarity about which European actors lead on advanced technology, and defence-industrial cooperation deeper than a single assembly line.
• The core debate can be stated in one line. Is the partnership finally strategic, or merely transactional under external pressure, in which case it loosens when the pressure does?
  • The strongest answer is that the 2026 package converts pressure into structure — a treaty that outlives an administration, a security partnership with a standing dialogue, and a mobility framework that creates constituencies.
  • Structure is not the same as strategy, but it is what strategy is made of.

Conclusion

• The long-standing verdict that the relationship had a long way to go before it could be called strategic was accurate when it was made, and is no longer accurate. What was missing was not affinity but content: no security instrument, no trade agreement, no defence-industrial contact, and a summit process that met when it could.
• Three external forces did what two decades of shared values could not — China’s coercion of both, Russia’s war on Europe, and American tariffs applied to friends. The content is now real, and most of it is nine months old.
• The unresolved question is symmetry. As the printed record has long insisted, success depends on whether the two can deal with each other as sovereign equals. CBAM, the deforestation and due-diligence regulations, data adequacy and the sanctions on Indian refiners are all European rules applied to Indian firms without Indian consent, and each tests whether Manmohan Singh’s natural partners describes a partnership or an aspiration.
• The measure to watch is ratification. A trade agreement that clears the European Parliament, a Security of Information Agreement that permits real intelligence exchange, and an Indian firm inside a European defence supply chain would settle the argument. Their absence in 2028 would settle it the other way.