India wants peace, but it is not assured: Modi on threat from China as he begins visit to France

India wants peace, but it is not assured, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on the threat of military aggression by China as he commenced his two-day tour to France on Thursday.

The prime minister told Les Echos that the strategic partnership between India and France was aimed at advancing “a free, open, inclusive, secure and stable Indo-Pacific region”.

“There is a strong defence and security component that extends from the seabed to space. It also seeks to help other countries in the region and strengthen the regional institutions for security cooperation and norm setting,” he said in an interview with the newspaper published in France.

Read: Modi’s France visit to focus on ways to expand defence cooperation

The interview was published shortly before Modi landed in Paris and was welcomed by French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne at the airport.

He and Borne later had a meeting and discussed furthering cooperation in various areas such as economy and trade, energy, environment, education, mobility, railways, digital public infrastructure, museology and people-to-people ties. The prime minister also had a meeting with the president of the French Senate, Gerard Larcher, and highlighted the significance of the shared values of India and France based on “democracy, freedom and equality”.

Modi’s meeting with President Emmanuel Macron on Friday is likely to see New Delhi and Paris stepping up defence cooperation, with big-ticket deals, including the ones for procuring 26 maritime versions of the Rafale combat aircraft for the Indian Navy from Dassault Aviation of France. The two sides may also ink a deal for manufacturing three additional Scorpene class submarines for the Indian Navy at Mazgaon Dockyards Limited in Mumbai with the transfer of technology from the French Naval Group. Besides, Safran of France is also interested in the co-development of a jet engine with the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) of India with full transfer of technology.

“Defence cooperation has progressed rapidly. We have started a genuine industrial partnership, including on co-design and co-development, not just for ourselves but also for other countries,” Modi told Les Echos.

He said that the India-France strategic partnership is one of the key partnerships in influencing the course of the Indo-Pacific region. “We (India and France) are the two major resident powers in the Indian Ocean region”, said the prime minister.

“While peace is necessary for the future we seek to build, it is far from assured,” he said in reply to a question on China’s increasing military spending to boost its defence capabilities and its implications for the security of India and others in the region. “India has always stood for peaceful resolution of differences through dialogue and diplomacy, and for respecting the sovereignty of all nations, international law and the rules-based international order,” added Modi, who later also had a private dinner with Macron in Paris on Thursday.

New Delhi’s move to expand defence cooperation with Paris comes amid a continuing stand-off between the Indian Army and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) – the de facto boundary between the two neighbouring nations – in eastern Ladakh. India has also been concerned over China’s military build-up and construction of dual-use infrastructure along the entire stretch of the disputed boundary between the two nations in the Himalayas as well as over increasing forays by the communist country’s PLA Navy in the Indian Ocean region.

France has substantial geopolitical interests in the western Indian Ocean and southern Pacific, with a large number of its military personnel deployed in the region. The French Government has territorial control over Réunion and Mayotte islands in the Indian Ocean and New Caledonia and French Polynesia in the Pacific. While over 60 per cent of France’s Exclusive Economic Zone is in the Pacific, over 20 per cent is in the Indian Ocean. Djibouti on the Horn of Africa has a base of the French Army. France, however, stayed away from the Quad – a coalition forged by India, Japan, Australia and the United States to counter China’s expansionist aspirations in the Indo-Pacific region, albeit with benign initiatives and without taking an overtly adversarial position against Xi Jinping’s ‘Middle Kingdom’.

“Our partnership, including in the Indo-Pacific region, is not directed against, or at the expense of any country. Our aim is to safeguard our economic and security interests, ensure freedom of navigation and commerce, advance the rule of international law in the region,” the prime minister said in the interview. “We work with other countries to develop their capabilities and support their efforts to make free sovereign choices. More broadly, we aim to advance peace and stability in the region.”

The prime minister’s state visit to Washington DC and his meetings with President Joe Biden on June 22 and 23 too saw the US moving to lift restrictions on sharing advanced defence technologies with India.