Are We Indeed Moving Towards an Indo-European Axis?
US President Donald Trump's policies are directly affecting India and Europe in many different ways, including his intention to annex Greenland (which belongs today to a European Union country, Denmark) and the restriction on H1B visas, that thousands of Indian migrants used to make a career in the US.
More importantly perhaps, his decision last August to increase US customs duties on Indian imports – a record increase of +50% – and those now in force for imports from European Union countries (+15%) exposes both entities to serious trade difficulties. This change in the rules of the game came at a time when New Delhi and Brussels had entered a new phase in their negotiations for a free trade agreement. During Ursula von der Leyen's visit to New Delhi in February 2025, both parties announced that such a treaty would be signed by the end of 2025. In light of Donald Trump's policies, this prospect is more relevant than ever and should happen next week during von der Leyen’s visit to Delhi, as chief guest of the Republic Day.
The short time frame of Trump's second term coincides with the long process of slow but steady rapprochement between India and Europe. The EU and India concluded a Cooperation Agreement in 1994, have held an annual summit since 2000 and signed a Strategic Partnership in 2004. But in 20 years, the signs of mutual respect and the increasing number of official visits have yet to translate into concrete achievements. At the EU level, the rapprochement accelerated in the second half of the last decade. The July 2020 EU-India summit, where an ambitious "India-EU 2025 agenda" was agreed, is usually seen as a "milestone" or "watershed moment" by insiders on both sides. However, a real turning point is still to come and may happen in 2026. In February 2025, von der Leyen tried to prepare the ground for such a move when she reserved the first official outside-EU visit of her second term for India. This gesture was intended to be all the more symbolic as she was accompanied for the occasion by a host of Commissioners – in fact, the entire College of Commissioners. It was then announced, as mentioned above, that an FTA between both entities would be finalised in 2025. If trade is a priority, other areas of cooperation are in the pipeline too – but some bones of contention will have to be overcome for a real rapprochement to materialise.
Trade, a priority
If, in recent years, the EU has become India's first or second trading partner in goods, the country represented only 2.1% of the EU's trade in 2022 – when it was valued at €115.3 billion (€47.6 billion in exports and €67.6 billion in imports) – and ranked only 10th among trading partners, trailing well behind the USA (11.1% of the EU’s trade) and China (9.9%).
Under Manmohan Singh, in 2007, when India was experiencing almost double-digit growth, the EU and India had entered into talks aimed at concluding a free trade agreement. These negotiations lasted six years without success.
One of the main stumbling blocks was agricultural products. Keen to protect its farmers from competition from European farmers, India was very protectionist when it came to dairy products, for example. It should be noted that at the time, the BJP, then in opposition, mobilised against "the potential flooding of the Indian market with 'dairy, poultry, sugar, wheat, confectionery, oilseeds, plantation products and fisheries'".
Automobiles were another issue, mostly because of the roles played by two interest groups: influential car associations such as the German VDA and the European ACEA on the one hand, and Indian carmakers such as Tata Motors on the other.
Thirdly, the EU was also willing to secure "a strong intellectual property regime (IPR) and a sustainable development chapter with social and environmental clauses, which India [was] reluctant to negotiate in the FTA context". Drug patents – India aspires to become the "pharmacy of the world", because of its strength in the generic drugs sector – became a serious bone of contention too.
Fourthly, the EU also requested the inclusion of labour standards, which were rejected by the Indian side. The European Parliament even demanded that "the FTA would address child and bonded labour by requiring India to sign on to key conventions of the International Labour Organisation"
For all these reasons, the trade negotiations between the EU and India were suspended in 2013.
On May 8, 2021, EU and Indian leaders agreed to resume negotiations for a "balanced, ambitious, comprehensive and mutually beneficial" trade agreement, and to launch separate negotiations on an investment protection agreement and an agreement on geographical indications (GIs). Leaders also agreed to link trade negotiations to finding "solutions to long-standing market access issues". Perhaps never before has the political will to reach an agreement been so strong on both sides for the geopolitical (and geo-economic) reasons mentioned in the introduction. But even before Trump's United States became more protectionist, von der Leyen had stated in her speech on India-EU relations in New Delhi on February 28, 2025: "The EU and India have the potential to be one of the defining partnerships of this era. That is why it will be a cornerstone of Europe's foreign policy in the years and decades to come" . The joint communiqué that concluded the visit also emphasised the priority of the free trade agreement.
We’ll know very soon what the EU-India FTA will look like. The agricultural issue remains so thorny that this sector of the economy will not be part of it. But how diluted this agreement will be remains to be seen. What we know for sure is that it will happen, simply because India and the EU, as middle powers, need to join hands to resist the emerging G2 made of China and the US – to paraphrase the recent speech by the prime minister of Canada in Davos.
But what else can be done?
Beyond trade
Although trade plays a central role in India-EU relations, and although the signing of an FTA between the two entities would represent a decisive step forward, their economic relations are not limited to this. Moreover, if the agreement is concluded, it should include a significant section devoted to investment.
European investment in India remains fairly limited compared to China (about $ 80 billion against $200 billion), yet India is striving to attract FDI as part of its "Make in India" programme in order to strengthen its struggling industrial base.
In Europe, from an investment perspective, India appears to be a potential partner for diversifying supply sources and thus reducing excessive dependence on China. This is evident from the agreement that Brussels and New Delhi concluded on semiconductors in 2023.
This roadmap lies at the interface between science and industry, where other areas of Indo-European cooperation can be found.
Europeans perceive Indians as being more gifted in science than in industry, which partly explains the creation in 2022 of an ‘India-EU Trade and Technology Council’ where, without losing sight of the economic – and even commercial – perspective, the emphasis was also placed on technological cooperation. This TTC houses three working groups – Strategic Technologies, Digital Governance and Digital Connectivity, Green and Clean Energy Technologies, and Trade, Investment and Resilient Value Chains. The terms of reference place these groups "at the nexus of trade, trusted technology and security". In fact, these developments went hand in hand with the launch by Paris and New Delhi of France-India Defence Startup Excellence (FRIND-X) in 2024 and the co-chairmanship, albeit mainly symbolic, of the International AI Summit by Emmanuel Macron and Narendra Modi.
India as an Indo-Pacific country
Geopolitically, the EU increasingly views India through the prism of the Indo-Pacific. While France was the first European country to formulate a doctrine (also known as a "strategy") for the Indo-Pacific in 2019, Germany was quick to follow suit in 2020, and the EU followed two months later in November 2020, even though Brussels had not accustomed us to such responsiveness. In this document, India does not occupy as central a place as ASEAN (a structure that is more similar to the EU), but it is by no means absent, far from it.
The adoption of an Indo-Pacific roadmap by the EU, reflects an important trend, with Brussels seeing itself more as a geopolitical and even geostrategic player. This trend, which has been accentuated by the war in Ukraine, dates back to the formulation of the European Union Global Strategy (EUGS) of 2016, which responded to criticisms of the Union by abandoning the EU's self-centric approach to external action based purely on normative values. Instead, the EU seeks to blend its traditional approach to policy with pragmatism. Democracy promotion, good governance and human rights are still important in EU external policies, but they exist within a more pragmatic way of making policy in the EU governance structures".
Recently, India has been perceived by the EU as a key partner in the Indo-Pacific from the point of view of maritime domain awareness, which implied information – and even intelligence – sharing. Given not only the rise of piracy but also China's growing presence in the Indian Ocean, the EU and India had good reasons to join forces in this domain. Initiated in 2014, CRIMARIO, which initially focused on the Western Indian Ocean region (CRIMARIO II expanded its range eastward), provided the right framework for this collaboration. This was achieved through "the IORIS platform – a maritime coordination and incident management tool for the region, coupled with extensive training programmes on maritime data processing".
The more the EU becomes a geopolitical animal following a realpolitik, the less it focuses on issues like democracy and human rights – but it cannot ignore them either, and that has been a source of tensions with India, sometimes.
Human rights as a bone of contention?
Democracy promotion is part of the DNA of the EU. In fact, on the basis of Articles 2 and 21 of the Treaty on European Union, the European Parliament considered that "Supporting democracy worldwide is a priority for the European Union". Respect for democracy remains an important criterion in the EU's choice of partners. From this point of view, India has long enjoyed an undeniable comparative advantage. The European Commission continues to refer to this country as "the largest democracy in the world". Ursula von der Leyen also presented India as "the largest country and democracy in the world" in her speech in Davos in 2025, where she announced her visit and that of the College of Commissioners.
The Commission congratulates itself that India and the EU have resumed their Bilateral Human Rights Dialogue that had stopped in 2013. But the meetings held in the context of this dialogue are not public and the final communiqués remain vague. The January 2025 meeting took place six months later, as the Indian side preferred to postpone the meeting originally scheduled for August 2024. Apart from platitudes reiterating the common commitment of Europeans and Indians to all human rights, the final joint communiqué merely lists the topics discussed behind closed doors.
Both sides discussed the issues related to civil and political rights; social, economic, and cultural rights; elimination of discrimination in all its manifestations; freedom of religion or belief; countering religious hatred; freedom of expression and opinion, both online and offline; gender, LGBTQI+ and the rights of the child; women's empowerment; and technology and human rights. The two sides also exchanged views on the rights of migrants, along with business and human rights.
However, this approach is no longer unanimously supported within the EU: while the Commission is sticking to this line, the European Parliament takes a different view. Tensions crystallised in 2019 because of the Citizenship Amendment Act passed by the Indian parliament. In January 2020, some MEPs introduced a motion against the CAA, which they viewed as discriminatory. The fact that the motion was not passed was seen as a significant diplomatic victory for India.
In 2021, when preparing for the EU-India summit, the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee made recommendations to the Commission. According to an insider who preferred to remain anonymous, these recommendations triggered a "fierce reaction from the Indian embassy", so much so that many parliamentary groups "felt the need for a debate in plenary".
The resolution that was eventually passed on April 13, 2021 by 61 votes out of 71 – a near-unanimous vote – devoted an entire section to “Promotion of the rule of law, human rights and good governance”, which called on the EU Commission to denounce the CAA, a measure that is “fundamentally discriminatory in nature against Muslims and dangerously divisive”; encourage India to guarantee the right to freely practice and propagate the religion of one's choice, as enshrined in Article 25 of its Constitution; work to eliminate and deter hate speech that incites discrimination or violence, which leads to a toxic environment where intolerance and violence against religious minorities can occur with impunity; share best practices on training police forces in tolerance and international human rights standards; recognise the link between anti-conversion laws and violence against religious minorities, particularly the Christian and Muslim communities.
The European Parliament continued to focus on human rights in India during Narendra Modi's visit to France, where Emmanuel Macron made him his guest of honour for the July 14 ceremonies in 2023. On July 11, it voted on an unprecedentedly strong motion in which it “Strongly condemned the acts of violence, loss of life and destruction of property in Manipur. Denounces in the strongest terms nationalistic rhetoric deployed by leading members of the BJP party”.
Russia: the elephant in the room
Today, human rights may not be a top priority for the European leaders. In fact, the main bone contention between India and the EU is Russia. While Vladimir Putin has become the number one enemy of most of the EU countries, he continues to be one of the closest partners of the Modi government, as evident from his official visit in New Delhi last year. Two subjects are particularly problematic for the Europeans. The Ukraine issue first: not only India has not condemned the invasion of this country by Russia and keeps abstaining in the UN when any related matter is discussed there, but it has become one of its first customers so far as oil is concerned. For years, Indian companies refined Russian oil for the European market, but now the EU countries would like the same firms to stop importing oil from Russia to deprive Moscow from these financial resources and force Putin to accept peace talks. Here, Brussels and Washington DC are on the same page, but Trump went one step further than the EU and punished India by imposing 25% additional tariffs on Indian imports. For the moment, the pressures coming from the West have made no significant impact: in 2024-25, India has imported for $ 63.84 billion of Russian oil. Not only that, but Reuters, in July 2025 revealed that an Indian company, Ideal Detonators was providing components of explosives to a Russian firm, Promsintez, working for the army.
Secondly, the Europeans are uncomfortable with the military cooperation between India and Russia. Not only does Russia remain India’s first source of foreign weapons, but some of this equipment is very sophisticated, like the S-400 and others are jointly produced, like the BraHmos missiles. But India and Russia are not only doing arms together: they have renewed their Defence Cooperation Program and have signed a Reciprocal Exchange of Logistical Support (RELOS) fleshing out their strategic partnership. This collaboration found expression in the joint military drills of Vostok in 2022, which also featured units from China, Laos, Mongolia, Nicaragua and Syria, and in the Russian-Belarusian joint military exercise called Zapad in September 2025 in which, besides India, Iran, Niger, Tadjikistan, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Congo and Mali also took part.
During their meeting in Delhi recently, S. Jaishankar told publicly to R. Sikorski, the Foreign minister of Poland, that “Poland should display zero tolerance for terrorism and not help fuel the terrorist infrastructure in our neighbourhood”, an oblique reference to his visit to Pakistan. Sikorski emphasised that on terrorism India and Poland are of “one mind” but he replied that if New Delhi worried about his visit to Pakistan, he disapproved of the fact that India took part in Zapad: “We all have regional concerns and we all have neighbours, and with neighbours you have opportunities and challenges...We also have concerns. India took part in the Zapad exercises in Russia that we find threatening”. This incident is revealing of the sensitivity of the issue.
In the near future, the India-Russia relations may become more problematic if the war in Ukraine continues to have devastating effects – especially for countries of the North and the East of the EU. If, on the contrary, things get normalised on that front, there is little risk to see the Indo-European rapprochement derailing – but its pace would then remain to be seen.
Christophe Jaffrelot is Senior Research Fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s College London, Non resident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Chair of the British Association for South Asian Studies.
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