Modi’s Macron-Lula Double Play: India’s Strategic Reset In A Fragmenting World

New Delhi intends not simply to balance between camps but to help design new platforms for cooperation that reflect developing countries’ interests.

India’s carefully orchestrated hosting of French President Emmanuel Macron and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva within the same week crystallises its ambition to move from passive balancer to active designer of the world’s evolving architecture.

Over the course of just a few days, New Delhi is hosting two leaders who encapsulate very different faces of global power: Macron’s visit from 17 to 19 February has already started. Lula landed today.

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Taken together, they amount to a carefully curated tableau of India’s diplomatic ambitions in a more fractured world.

France brings hard power, advanced technology and a permanent UN Security Council seat; Brazil brings demographic weight, resource abundance and political legitimacy across the Global South.

To have these visits staged back-to-back is a signal of serious intention. In a global order marked by great-power frictions and competing economic blocs, New Delhi intends not simply to balance between camps but to help design new platforms for cooperation that reflect developing countries’ interests.

From Horizon 2047 to a ‘Special Global Strategic Partnership’

India’s relationship with France has been moving steadily from transactional to structural, a trajectory anchored by the Horizon 2047 roadmap established in 2023. Macron’s current visit formalises this shift, marking the elevation of ties to a “Special Global Strategic Partnership" that will shape cooperation through India’s centenary of independence and fifty years of bilateral strategic partnership. This consolidation of milestones underscores why Horizon 2047 matters: it signals not just continuity but a long-term strategic commitment at the highest level.

An annual Foreign Ministers’ Comprehensive Dialogue now anchors the relationship, tasked with reviewing progress on economic security, multilateral coordination and people-to-people links.

The launch of the 2026 India–France Year of Innovation further strengthens these ties. It brings together universities, laboratories and start-ups in areas from artificial intelligence and cyberspace to health and sustainable development.

Paris’s co-chairing of the Working Group on Resilience, Innovation and Efficiency at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi. It aligns French and Indian priorities around responsible AI and equitable access to digital tools. Precisely, the agenda India has tried to frame as it speaks for developing countries left at the margins of earlier technology revolutions.

Brazil’s partnership with India sits on a different historical foundation but is undergoing a similar upgrade. New Delhi and Brasília have been strategic partners since 2006. But Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to Brazil in July 2025, the first Indian PM to do so in 57 years, triggered an effort to turn broad alignment into a concrete, sectoral agenda.

Lula’s current trip, accompanied by around 14 ministers and an unusually large business delegation, is billed by both sides as a chance to unlock that potential in pharmaceuticals, renewable energy, critical minerals, aviation and agricultural technology.

Technology, Digital Sovereignty and the AI Pivot

The technology pillar of the India–France relationship has showcased how New Delhi seeks to combine openness with sovereignty in the digital domain. Macron and Modi have jointly inaugurated the Indo-French Centre for AI in Health at AIIMS New Delhi, targeting joint research on early detection of neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s through machine learning-enabled MRI analysis.

It has been complemented by partnerships between France’s PariSanté Campus and India’s Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP), formalised in a Letter of Intent signed in February 2025 to establish an Indo-French Life Sciences Sister Innovation Hub, and by a Franco–Indian life sciences campus linking more than 22 institutions across both countries.

A binational centre on digital sciences and technology between INRIA and India’s Department of Science and Technology had also been announced, alongside the renewal of MoUs between CNRS and Indian agencies, pushing cooperation into core areas of digital infrastructure and advanced materials. These were not minor add-ons; they had buttressed India’s attempt to develop its own standards and capabilities in AI, data governance and digital public infrastructure, even as it engaged deeply with foreign partners.

Lula’s attendance at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi will add a Global South dimension to this conversation. Brazil and India have had shared concerns about the concentration of AI capabilities. Discussions have also included the risk that regulatory regimes set in the Global North become de facto global standards. Framing AI cooperation around “Digital Public Infrastructure has allowed New Delhi to present its own model of open yet sovereign digital ecosystems to fellow developing nations.

Defence: From Buyer–Seller to Co-Producer

Nowhere had the transformation with France been more visible than in defence. The intergovernmental agreement for 26 Rafale-Marine fighters for the Indian Navy, signed in August 2025 and valued at about Rs 64,000 crore, was built on the earlier induction of 36 Rafale jets into the air force.

Negotiations are also underway for 114 Rafale fighters for the Indian Air Force under the MRFA programme, roughly 90 in the F4 standard with an option for 24 in the future F5 standard, with explicit wording that placed domestic manufacturing at the centre of the package. Tata Advanced Systems had already signed agreements with Dassault to build major Rafale fuselage sections at a new facility in Hyderabad and is expected to deliver up to 24 fuselages a year by the latter half of the 2020s.

The industrial footprint around these deals had been expanding rapidly and was still expanding as Macron arrived in New Delhi. Safran has committed around €200 million to a LEAP engine maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) centre in Hyderabad. It is due to be operational in 2026 with a capacity for about 300 shop visits a year, and has also been investing over €40 million in a dedicated M88 engine MRO facility for Rafale powerplants at the same hub.

The company has also been signalling that India would be a “key pillar" of its global manufacturing system and will help triple its revenue in the country to more than €3 billion by 2030. Half of that is to be generated by “Made in India" production. In parallel, Safran and BEL have also set up a joint venture to manufacture the HAMMER precision-guided weapon system domestically. It will be crucial in anchoring a Make in India production line for a capability that was being integrated across platforms from Rafale to the Tejas light combat aircraft.

With Brazil, the defence agenda is more incipient but politically significant. Both sides see scope for joint work in defence manufacturing, and for leveraging complementarities in sectors like aerospace, where Brazilian firms have deep experience. For India, cultivating a major Latin American democracy on defence issues reinforces its preference for diversified security partnerships over tight alliance commitments—a choice that helps preserve freedom of manoeuvre amid mounting US–China rivalry.

Critical Minerals and the Politics of Economic Security

Behind the military hardware lies a quieter but equally consequential agenda: securing supply chains for the energy transition and digital economy. A Joint Declaration of Intent on critical minerals cooperation between India and France seeks to build diversified, sustainable and resilient chains in exploration, extraction, processing and recycling.

That goal is mostly strategic; it reflects unease in both capitals at the concentration of critical mineral processing in a handful of countries and the weaponisation of interdependence in recent geopolitical crises.

Brazil’s resource endowment makes it central to this story. Officials in New Delhi see opportunities for joint ventures across the mineral value chain, from exploration and mining to beneficiation and refining.

The aim is to lock in access to raw materials and create shared processing capacity that lifts both countries up the value ladder. A parallel effort with France to amend the bilateral tax treaty, giving investors greater certainty, underscores how economic security is being built not only through supply contracts but through regulatory and fiscal frameworks designed to encourage long-term capital commitments.

India’s trade with Brazil provides a platform for this. Pharmaceutical companies in both countries are exploring partnerships that could widen access to affordable medicines; energy firms are eyeing collaborations in solar, biofuels and green hydrogen.

In each case, the Macron and Lula visits are moments to lock in arrangements whose real impact will be felt in plant locations, technology transfers and pricing power over the next decade.

The Measure of Success

The true test of this will be whether, five years from now, Rafale-M jets assembled with Indian components are flying from Indian carriers, whether the H125 assembly line is exporting to Africa, whether joint ventures with Brazil are processing critical minerals in India and Latin America rather than shipping ores to third countries. It will be whether the Indo-French AI health centre and Indo-Brazilian digital partnerships have produced tangible tools used in public hospitals and welfare schemes.

For now, the evidence points to a strategy for success. The defence industrial projects with France are already underway; the AI and life sciences centres have been launched. Brazil’s largest-ever delegation to India means that political intentions are being backed by commercial interest. As India moves towards its BRICS presidency in 2026 and continues to press for a permanent seat on the Security Council, the architecture being built with France and Brazil could give it more than a rhetorical claim to leadership of the Global South.

In a fragmenting world order, power is increasingly measured not just by military strength or GDP, but by the ability to convene, connect and set agendas. Modi’s Macron–Lula double play is best read as an early demonstration of that capacity. Whether it matures into a durable influence will depend on whether New Delhi can keep turning diplomatic set pieces into binding, mutually beneficial deals – without losing the strategic autonomy it has guarded so carefully for decades.

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