As Modi attends Bastille Day parade, a reminder: arms deals are a key element in India-France ties

At one of the most extravagant military parades in the world, France’s Bastille Day, India is the guest of honour this year. It will be the second time India has received this invitation where the Indian prime minister and troops participate in the ceremony as special guests.

In 2009, I was at the Champs Elysées when President Nicolas Sarkozy invited Manmohan Singh to Paris. Indian soldiers marched down the famous avenue. There was a garden party right after the parade, to which, along with the Indian contingent and the prime minister, journalists were invited by Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni.

Separated from the dignitaries with a row of potted plants, we enjoyed French food and wine in the lush undulating greens of the Elysée Palace. Only in later years, during Indo-French bilateral visits could I get a glimpse of the gilded interiors of the 300-year palace. The French President lives and works here with 800 staff. The garden party has been banned since as it was considered too lavish, but the parade still thrives.

Why is India the only country invited twice as a special guest to this parade? It would have been simple enough to say that French President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Narendra Modi are great friends or that this is the 25th year of strategic cooperation between their two countries.

After all, Modi calls the French President “my friend” publicly, and Macron affectionately replies with “[d]ear Narendra”. Modi seems to love France – this is his sixth visit here. This time, he is invited by the French President and his wife, Brigitte Macron, for dinner at the Louvre (though journalists aren’t).

Pat on the back?

However, it’s hard to ignore that India received this “honour” in 2009, the year after the signing of the civil nuclear cooperation deal that allowed France to push its biggest-ever project abroad to India – the world’s biggest nuclear plant, worth more than 50 billion euros, currently stalled. A year after France delivered 36 Rafale jets to India for a whopping 7.8 billion euros, India has been invited again. This so-called honour looks more like a pat on the back for India for its patronage of French merchandise and some not-so-subtle flattery to encourage further purchases. The buzz is that India will likely purchase 26 Rafale-Marine fighters and three more Scorpène submarines.

The grandeur of this parade overshadows the underlying lacklustre Indo-French relations. France is only India’s 11th-largest foreign investor, and bilateral trade remains far below potential. Trade with France constitutes only 1.41% of India’s total international trade, and French exports to India decreased by 21% from April 2020 to March 2021.

Stale cultural stereotypes persist on both sides as far as people are concerned. There are barely 109,000 Indians, including NRIs, and less than 10,000 Indian students and professionals studying and working in mainland France. The French media remains largely ignorant of what’s going on in India but is fascinated with India’s status as the world’s most populous country and its projected trajectory as one of the two leading economic powerhouses alongside China. French officials seem to project some shared insecurities over China.

Despite all the rhetoric around its close ties to India, France, when it comes to crucial matters, aligns itself firmly with the affluent nations of the Global North. This alignment was evident when I covered the 2015 climate conference in Paris, where Modi was also present. India faced significant pressure from wealthy nations, including France, and was framed along with China as “the world’s biggest polluters”.

On the other hand, India asserted that developed nations were failing to fulfil their financial obligations and trying to shift their responsibilities onto developing nations. France positioned itself firmly in the camp of these developed nations.

In 1998, France solidified its relations with India by declaring it a “strategic partnership”. India had carried out its first nuclear tests, asserting itself as a nuclear-weapon state. Notably, France was the foremost major power from the Global North to engage in dialogue with India at the time, with Jacques Chirac serving as French President and Atal Behari Vajpayee as Indian Prime Minister.

India appears to be managing this debt while actively pursuing arms deals promoted vigourously by France. Arms deal are now a significant foundation of the Indo-France relationship. The French president gets brownie points for bolstering the economy as the Indian prime minister stockpiles his popularity among the bellicose.

‘A bad calculation’

Are the French concerned about Modi’s critics? On the eve of the Indian prime minister’s visit, new revelations of corruption in the Rafale deal surfaced in French media. The leading French daily, Le Monde declared inviting the Indian Prime Minister was “a bad calculation” because, under him, democracy was under attack in India. An online journal wrote about “Narendra Modi, or the end of Indian democracy”. Human rights groups and political parties also issued statements against the Indian Prime Minister’s presence at the parade.

However, the French imperialist worldview frames India and many other countries in the Global South as inherently corrupt electoral autocracies. What matters is that they should be good customers ready to spend millions.

France’s national day originally meant to celebrate the fall of the monarchy and the storming of the Bastille prison on 14th July, 1789. Ironically, President Macron is often mocked as King Napolean and for his infamous remarks praising the authoritarian monarch.

The national day parade is anachronistic and comes across as a chauvinist celebration of France’s neoliberal and military ethos.

Critics of the annual parade that will honour India this year consider it imperialist, archaic, and polluting. France and India are among the few countries that hold large-scale military parades along with North Korea, Russia, and China – all seen as belligerent with dubious human rights records.

According to some conservative estimates by the French media, Bastille Day celebrations cost at least 4.5 million euros or Rs 40 crores. Regarding expenditure, India set aside Rs 5.94 lakh crores for its military budget this year, and the French will be keen to dig into that. It has become India’s second-biggest arms supplier after Russia, whereas India is now the world’s biggest arms importer, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. World military expenditure has reached a record high of $2240 billion – feverish spending on war preps in a world that needs more peace.

Amidst the excitement around sales of shiny high-tech fighter jets and submarines that impress with their price tags, it is often overlooked that the Stockholm institute estimates that corruption in arms trades forms roughly 40% to all corruption in global transactions. This corruption is said to exact a heavy toll on purchasing and selling countries, undermining democratic institutions.

For a large majority in France, 14th July is a day for festivities such as firefighters’ street parties and fireworks. Tens of thousands come to the Champs-Elysées for the parade. Last year, over 700,000 people gathered around the Eiffel Tower for the annual evening fireworks that are generally quite spectacular (and polluting).

Hundreds of cars are torched every year on this day in revolts against police killings of young individuals from Arab and African backgrounds in impoverished urban suburbs. The UN Human Rights Council recently slammed France overpolice violence. Due to concerns of potential unrest, firework displays in several municipalities, including the western Paris suburb of Nanterre, where 17-year-old Nahel Mabrouk was killed by the French police last month, have been cancelled. Private fireworks and sale of pyrotechnic materials are banned.

The theme of this year’s parade in Paris is “moral forces”; pacifists who find this demonstration of military prowess and hardware immoral are not likely to be impressed, nor are the critics of the French president and the Indian prime minister.

Noopur Tiwari is a journalist based in Paris. She has covered Europe for the last 20 years for the Indian media. She is also the founder of the award-winning feminist platform Smashboard.org.