Contrat du siècle: après la gifle australienne, la main tendue indienne?
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Contract of the century: after the Australian slap, the Indian hand out?
India and France will strengthen their cooperation in the Indo-Pacific. A historic partner of the French defence industry, could New Delhi turn the slap in the face suffered by France in Australia to its advantage? Insights.
Could the French fiasco in Australia, by ricochet, serve Indian interests?
Since Canberra torpedoed the "contract of the century" for 12 submarines with the complicity of the Biden Administration, eyes have been on India. New Delhi has expressed interest in the French submersibles and has budgeted 12 billion euros to acquire six nuclear-powered submarines. "One idea is gaining ground among analysts in the capital: New Delhi must seize the opportunity to push France to transfer its submersible technology, particularly in nuclear propulsion," reports Le Figaro.
"The taboo of nuclear dissemination has been shattered"
On 21 September, Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi spoke by phone. The two statesmen reaffirmed their willingness to act jointly in the Indo-Pacific region. According to the Elysée, the President of the Republic insisted on "France's commitment to contribute to strengthening India's strategic autonomy, including its industrial and technological base". It remains to be seen whether a French concession in the strategic and sovereign field of nuclear propulsion is possible.
"It seems quite logical on the Indian side to widen the gap to ensure a transfer of technology that the Americans are not ready to do," journalist Olivier Da Lage admitted to Sputnik.
Author of the essay L'Inde, désir de puissance (Éd. Armand Colin, 2017), he underlines that the "taboo of nuclear dissemination has been shattered" following the announcement by Joe Biden and Boris Johnson of such a technology transfer to Australia.
"In India's current frame of mind, the issue of technology transfer will arise anyway. India really wants to achieve the fullest possible autonomy as quickly as possible. I find it hard to imagine them simply asking for submarines without participating in their development and construction, which was the case with the Scorpene."
In 2005, New Delhi had placed an order for six submersibles with DCNS (now renamed Naval Group), built in Bombay. This contract was accompanied by a technology transfer "unprecedented for Indian industry", to quote the French group. The process was also a prerequisite for the Rafale contract. Dassault was only able to partially avoid this by drastically reducing the number of aircraft: initially 126, of which 108 were manufactured in India, the operation was finally concluded with 36 aircraft manufactured in France.
As Olivier Da Lage reminds us, France is a 'highly valued' partner for the Indians in military matters. A long-standing relationship. If the "spectacular" Rafale contract signed in 2016 "has entrenched the idea in India that France is a strategic partnership", as early as the 1950s, India had bought 130 Ouragan ground attack aircraft and 110 Mystère IVs from Dassault Aviation, then around fifty Mirage 2000s in the mid-1980s. The latter were particularly famous during the Kargil conflict in 1999, enabling the Indian army to destroy Pakistani strongholds on the Himalayan peaks.
Since these feats of arms, the Mirage 2000 remains the main multi-role aircraft of the Indian Air Force (IAF). So much so that at the beginning of the week, the Indian press revealed that New Delhi had bought 24 demobilised Mirage 2000 from Paris at the end of August in order to maintain its fleet in spite of the arrival of the Rafale on the air bases in Kashmir.
French word more reliable than American
Despite the hitch of having inflicted an embargo on India during the second Indo-Pakistani war of 1965, France enjoys the status of a power not aligned with any of the blocs and of not being the former British coloniser. In 1998, these bilateral links in the field of defence were concretised by the signature of a strategic partnership. Paris recognised India's pivotal role in the region and wished to support it in international bodies, promoting cooperation in the fields of defence, civil nuclear energy, trade and industry. A privileged relationship that has never ceased to grow and around which Paris has built its strategy in the Indo-Pacific region.
France thus remains India's second largest arms supplier behind Russia, which remains by far the country's leading partner. This is an important position, given that India is the second largest importer of arms in the world after Saudi Arabia.
"Rightly or wrongly, the French are seen as putting fewer conditions on the delivery of arms than the Americans: there is no Congress that can come and vote to impose restrictions and we don't anticipate that a change of President could change the arms delivery policy.
But Franco-Indian relations are not limited to the defence sector. In another strategic sector, nuclear power, France's EDF is planning to build six EPR reactors in Jaitapur, in southwest India. It is in this "continuity" of Franco-Indian relations that Olivier Da Lage considers an Indian request to acquire nuclear propulsion plausible.
India as a partner of the United States and Australia
However, Paris is not the only Western ally of choice for New Delhi. Despite the crisis between France and the United States and Australia, Narenda Modi "is not letting the Anglo-Saxons down at all".
Indeed, while Emmanuel Macron has had a phone call from the Indian Prime Minister, the latter is in Washington on 22 September, "not only to speak at the United Nations General Assembly, but also to take part in a meeting of the 'Quad'", says Olivier Da Lage. This is his first visit outside the immediate vicinity since the start of the pandemic," he adds. The Quad, or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, is a cooperation group that has brought together Japan, Australia, India and the US since 2007.
Although less formal than the newly launched Aukus with London and Canberra, it is nothing less than an alliance against the backdrop of growing competition between Washington and Beijing. It remains to be seen whether India will have the financial means to fulfil its ambitions. Indeed, New Delhi "does not have infinitely large coffers", concludes Olivier Da Lage. Above all, it remains to be hoped that the Quad under American tutelage will not have the same effects on France as the Aukus.
www.abc.net.au
www.airforcetimes.com
www.telegraph.co.uk
us.yahoo.com
