C. Raja Mohan is Director, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, and the consulting editor on foreign affairs for 'The Indian Express'. Before his association with The Indian Express began in 2004, Raja Mohan worked for The Hindu as its Washington correspondent and Strategic Affairs Editor. He was a distinguished fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. In his academic avatar, Raja Mohan has been professor of South Asian Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. As a think tanker, he worked at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses and Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. He is on the editorial board of various international affairs journals and is affiliated with the Institute of South Asian Studies, Singapore; the Lowy Institute, Sydney; and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington DC. He is the author, most recently, of Samudra Manthan: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Indo-Pacific.
Old new friends
Why in a more uncertain world order, India and France are natural partners in building the new coalitions.
For nearly four decades, successive French presidents — Francois Mitterand in the 1980s, Jacques Chirac from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s and Nicolas Sarkozy after that — made repeated efforts to elevate the engagement with India to a higher level. If Paris was an eager suitor, Delhi was distracted. Preoccupied with other major powers — US, Russia and China — and burdened by its inherited Anglo-Saxon bias, Delhi could hardly appreciate the pivotal value of France, and more broadly that of Europe, in transforming India’s international position.
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