India and France: Anatomy of a Defence Partnership That Doesn’t Need a Headline

In June 2026, Emmanuel Macron ended Narendra Modi’s visit to France with a video in Hindi “France Bharat ki dosti amar rahe,” may the friendship be eternal followed by a sheepish “I hope it was correct.” It was a charming moment, and like most charming diplomatic moments, it was also slightly beside the point. The substance of the India-France relationship isn’t in farewell videos. It’s in shipyards, assembly lines, and a quiet strategic calculation both capitals made years ago and have stuck with ever since.

That calculation is worth understanding, because it explains why France not the United States, has become the partner India turns to when it wants to build serious military capability at home.

Where things stand

Start with the raw shape of it. According to SIPRI’s arms-transfer data, India remains the world’s second-largest arms importer, and France has become its single largest supplier of imported weapons, overtaking a Russia whose share of the Indian market has fallen sharply over the past decade. That is a structural shift, not a one-off sale. It reflects dozens of decisions across air, sea and land programmes that have steadily braided the two defence establishments together.

In the air, the Indian Air Force already flies 36 Rafale jets. In April 2025, India signed for 26 more in the naval variant Rafale-M – to operate from the carriers INS Vikrant and INS Vikramaditya, a roughly ₹63,000 crore deal that makes India the first export customer for the carrier-capable Rafale. Deliveries run from 2028 into the early 2030s. Crucially, the package isn’t just aircraft; it includes provisions to integrate Indian-made weapons and to stand up maintenance and production facilities on Indian soil.

At sea, six Scorpène-class submarines the Kalvari class now serve the Indian Navy, every one built at Mazagon Dock in Mumbai under technology transfer from France’s Naval Group. On land and in industry, the threads multiply: a Tata-Airbus final assembly line for H125 helicopters near Bengaluru, a tie-up between Bharat Electronics and France’s Safran to produce HAMMER precision-guided munitions in India, and a ten-year defence cooperation framework renewed at the February 2026 dialogue in Bengaluru.

None of this produces dramatic television. That’s rather the point. A relationship that needs an annual signing ceremony to justify itself is still transactional. One that can spend a leaders’ summit as PM Modi and President Macron did in June on artificial intelligence, space and startups, while the hardware cooperation simply continues underneath, has moved into a different register.

Why France

So why France? The honest answer is a mix of what France offers and what others don’t.

The United States sells superb equipment but attaches end-use monitoring, certification regimes and a web of conditions that sit awkwardly with India’s instinct for strategic autonomy. India does not want a supplier who can later ask uncomfortable questions about how, where and against whom its weapons are used. France, by contrast, has been willing to transfer technology with comparatively few strings and that willingness, more than the hardware itself, is the foundation of the relationship.

There’s also geography. France is not a visitor to the Indo-Pacific; it lives there. Through Réunion and Mayotte it is a resident Indian Ocean power with territory, troops and an exclusive economic zone in the region. When India and France talk about a “free, open and rules-based Indo-Pacific” diplomatic shorthand both sides used again at their maritime dialogue in 2026 – they are describing a shared interest in not letting any single power, China most obviously, set the rules of the maritime commons unchallenged.

And there is trust accumulated over time. France did not lecture India after its 1998 nuclear tests the way much of the West did. Paris has treated New Delhi as a peer rather than a client. That history buys a kind of patience that newer partnerships can’t replicate.

The deepest cooperation runs underwater

If you want to see how far the relationship has travelled, watch the submarine programme, because it shows the shift from buying to building more clearly than anything else.

The Kalvari boats were always meant to do double duty: deliver submarines and teach an industry how to make them. That teaching is beginning to pay off. India’s DRDO has developed an indigenous Air-Independent Propulsion (AIP) system – fuel-cell technology that lets a conventional submarine stay submerged for around two weeks rather than surfacing every few days. Greater endurance is, in practice, greater stealth. INS Khanderi is reported to be the first boat slated to receive it, with a new hull section to be cut in and the module integrated over the coming period. The specific dates in circulation come from unnamed officials and have already slipped once, so they’re best read as intentions rather than commitments. But the shape of the thing is unmistakable: an Indian-designed capability going into a French-designed hull.

Then there is Karwar – the least glamorous and possibly most significant development of the year. In March 2026, Naval Group’s facility in Karnataka commissioned a test rig for the pneumatic systems that raise a submarine’s masts and periscopes. Until then, servicing those components meant shipping them to France, a capability that by the official account existed in only two countries on earth: France and Brazil. Maintenance is where fleets quietly succeed or fail, and bringing this in-house is the difference between operating submarines and depending on someone else to keep them running.

What to actually watch

The headline-grabbing items are the jets and the submarines. The thing actually worth tracking is quieter: whether the transfer of how to build keeps pace with the delivery of what’s built. A partnership measured in platforms is a sophisticated form of dependence. A partnership measured in capabilities India eventually won’t need help to sustain is something else closer to the sovereignty both governments keep invoking.

That is the real test of President Macron’s “dosti amar rahe.” You don’t promise a customer that the friendship is eternal. You say it to a partner you expect to be building with for the next thirty years. Whether the next thirty years deliver on that promise will depend less on the warmth of farewell videos and more on the unglamorous machinery underneath them – the workshops, the engineers, and the slow, difficult business of learning to make things yourself.