French President Visit Re-Energises Ties

France is the first country in the Western world to have forged a strategic partnership with India despite the undercurrents of India’s nuclear tests in Pokhran in May 1998

- Air Marshal B.K. Pandey (Retd)

EMMANUEL MACRON, THE YOUNGEST EVER CITIZEN OF FRANCE to be elected at the age of 39 as the President of France, arrived in India on March 9 this year on a four-day state visit. This was his first visit to India after he took over his new appointment in May 2017. He was accompanied by his wife Brigitte Marie- Claude Macron, a number of senior Ministers from his Cabinet and a business delegation of CEOs of 40 French companies, including those from the defence sector. The French President and his team were accorded a grand welcome as, ignoring all protocol, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a display of extraordinary cordiality, was present at the Delhi Airport to receive the state guest and his team when they landed there at 2145 hours.

This visit to India by the President of France came around nine months after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to France in the first week of June 2017. The first interaction between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Emmanuel Macron had taken place in Paris barely a month after the latter had assumed charge as the President. Visit to India by President Macron in March 2018 also coincided with the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of the strategic partnership between India and France that was signed in 1998 between President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee. Incidentally, France is the first country in the Western world to have forged a strategic Partnership with India despite the undercurrents of India’s nuclear tests in Pokhran in May 1998 that had met with harsh disapproval by the United States.