PARIS — France is staging a seduction marketing campaign for visiting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, visitor of honor at Friday’s annual Bastille Day parade, with the French president calling India a “key” participant “in our future.”
France is trying to additional strengthen cooperation on an array of subjects starting from local weather to army gross sales and the strategic Indo-Pacific area. But human rights, seen as an more and more urgent topic for Modi’s India, was lacking from the huge agenda.
President Emmanuel Macron praised India in a speech Thursday night earlier than French protection officers as a “key partner.”
“It is a giant in the history of the world that will have a determining role in our future,” Macron mentioned, forward of a dinner with Modi on the Elysee Palace. India “is also a strategic partner and friend.”
Macron, with Modi at his aspect, will preside over Friday’s grandiose annual army parade to mark France’s nationwide day. Indian troops will march and three French-made Indian Rafale jets will do a fly-by.
As Modi arrived Thursday, India’s Defense Acquisition Council permitted the acquisition of 26 Rafales for the Indian Navy, an accord in precept introduced by the Indian Defense Ministry. The value is to be negotiated with the French, a press release mentioned. The buy of three Scorpene submarines, developed by France and Spain, was additionally permitted.
Critics have voiced concern about France giving such a perch to Modi. India’s 72-year-old prime minister is broadly considered as more and more authoritarian and his Hindu nationalist get together as divisive. In a report in April, the marketing campaign group Amnesty International mentioned freedom of expression had declined below Modi.
The European Parliament handed a decision on Thursday for “human rights to be integrated into all areas of the EU-India partnership, including in trade.” The decision known as on member states “to systematically and publicly raise human rights concerns” on the highest degree.
Modi’s two-day go to comes as Paris and New Delhi mark the twenty fifth anniversary of their strategic partnership. Crucially, it precedes Macron’s journey this month to the Indo-Pacific area, house to 1.5 million French nationals. Talks with Modi are geared toward guaranteeing the huge area stays an area the place safety, notably of the seas, and different key issues like local weather are preserved. Macron known as it “an essential strategy for the balance of the planet.”
Modi is being courted by different nations. His two-day go to to France comes on the heels of his June journey to the United States, the place President Joe Biden supplied Modi a lavish welcome. Modi was just lately in Egypt and he’s to move to the United Arab Emirates after leaving France.
Ten personalities, together with famous economist Thomas Piketty and former French ambassador to Denmark France Zimeray, implored Macron in a commentary Thursday within the newspaper Le Monde to “encourage Prime Minister Modi to end repression of the civil society, assure freedom of major media (outlets) and protect religious liberty.”
Modi, who governs the world’s largest inhabitants, hardly ever talks to the press at house or overseas. But responding to a human rights query at a uncommon information convention throughout his Washington journey, he mentioned that “democracy runs in our veins” and insisted that there’s ”completely no area for discrimination.”
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Youcef Bounab in Paris contributed to this report.
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