Indo-Pacific, Ukraine on the table as Jaishankar arrives

External affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar arrived in Paris on Sunday for a three-day visit to cement bilateral ties as well as to discuss the Ukraine crisis and the security environment in the Indo-Pacific region.

During his packed visit, he will meet his French counterpart Jean Yves Le Drian, minister for French armed forces Florence Parly, and is expected to call on French president Emmanuel Macron.

The visit will be high on political content as Paris and New Delhi are key strategic partners and France is the only permanent member of the Security Council that does not have defence ties with India’s adversaries Pakistan and China. France has a presence in the Indo-Pacific region in the form of Reunion Island and is also a crucial peacemaker in the Ukraine stand-off, with Macron holding talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin to defuse the situation.

India and France will hold the next round of their strategic dialogue next month and the current visit will be focused on geopolitical and defence issues. Jaishankar will address a conference of EU foreign ministers on the Indo-Pacific as well as hold a head of mission conference for Indian envoys in Europe.

With France being one of India’s closest strategic allies, Jaishankar is expected to hold discussions with his counterparts on sharing critical and emerging technologies. Defence cooperation between the two countries is discussed in the strategic dialogue, which is expected to take place next month in India.

In the meeting with Indian envoys in Europe, the minister is likely to spell out the Modi government’s vision for Europe as well as share the assessment of Indian ambassadors. Jaishankar’s visit comes a day after his visit to the Munich Security Conference in Germany, marked by his firm counter to critics calling the Quad alliance as an Asian version of NATO.

During his visit to Munich, he spoke at length on India’s relations with China, and most importantly the notions surrounding the Quad alliance which also includes Australia, the United States and Japan.

Rejecting the notion that Quad was an Asian NATO as a ‘misleading term’, Jaishankar asked the critics not to slip into the lazy analogy.

“It isn’t because there are three countries who are treaty allies. We are not a treaty ally. It doesn’t have a treaty, a structure, a secretariat, it’s a kind of 21st century way of responding to a more diversified, dispersed world,” Jaishankar argued.

During the Munich Security Conference, Jaishankar said India’s ties with China were going through a difficult phase.

“For 45 years, there was peace and there was stable border management. There were no military casualties on the border. That changed. We had agreements with China not to bring the military forces to the Line of Actual Control and the Chinese violated those agreements. Now the state of the border will determine the state of the relationship. That’s natural,” news agency ANI quoted Jaishankar.

When the event’s moderator asked about India’s role in European security vis-à-vis the Ukrainian crisis, Jaishankar denied that the two events were analogous.

“We have quite distinct challenges, what is happening here or what is happening in the Indo-Pacific. In fact, if there was a connection by that logic, you would have had a lot of European powers already taking very sharp positions in the Indo-Pacific. We didn’t see that. We haven’t seen that since 2009,” Jaishankar said.