Dialogue on technology partnership that will glue future relationships
The West has been knocking at Delhi’s doors of late, given the sudden change in the geopolitical landscape, with the Ukraine crisis still raging. Delhi is cautious in its approach, acknowledging the constraints of domestic politics of Europe, the US,the UK and Australia, while not upsetting ally Russia. However, there is a new tilt in the bilateral/multilateral relations between India and the western powers. This is a pivot for India to choose its allies in the new global order where technological capabilities will decide the fortunes and survival of nations. EU president Ursula von der Leyen was in India along with senior ministers from Europe to announce setting up of the Technology and Trade Council (TTC) with New Delhi. The TTC is a “strategic coordination mechanism to allow both partners to tackle challenges at the nexus of trade, trusted technology and security, and thus deepen cooperation in these fields between the EU and India”. This is the first time India has signed a bilateral trade facilitation agreement within a critical and emerging technology architecture. The TTC is the second for EU, after it signed similar deal with US last year. Its proposed agreement with Japan along the same lines is pending. The writing on the digital future smart screen is clear, it is the centricity of technology-related negotiations in any future trade and investment deal with strategic allies. The second takeaway is the Ukraine crisis, along with growing China Russia intimacy, is forcing Europe,the US andthe UK to rekindle their strategicengagements in the Indo-Pacific region (where India geographically is at the centre) to build a trusted allies network, preferably with democracies. The third takeaway is that the West realises the need to diversify their sphere of friends and allies and preferably blunt aggressive China tactics on marine pathways and coercive inland infrastructure policy.
The TTC between India and EU will take a couple of months to have a secretarial structure. There will be working groups, as in the EU-US TTC, to deal with cooperation and coordination on Technology Standards in critical and emerging technologies such asArtificial intelligence. The other WGs’focusis on data governance tech platformregulations, secure supply chains, misuse of technology threatening security, export controls, investment screening, challenges to global trade, promotion of small and medium sector enterprises for using digital technologies, ICT industry security and competitiveness and climate and green technology. The US has nominated secretary of state Antony Blinken, secretary of commerce Gina Raimondo and USTR Katherine Tai as co-chair while EU has two executive vice president ranking officials as their senior most representatives. It gives India a glimpse of what can be expected when the final contours of the TTC are solemnised. India can expect similar WG structures where most of the agendas from the US TTC can be duplicated. It could be a challenging for India to totally convince the political constituency regarding the effectiveness of having negotiations on sensitive technology related issues in such bilateral trade and investment forums. It would not be surprising if vested lobbies start blacklisting the entire process as a threat to India’ s sovereignty. External affairs minister S Jaishankar and Commerce minister along with Minister of Information Technology are likely to be India’s nominees to the TTC with EU and lot will depend on their coordination as a team to convince the parliament. It would also help the bureaucracy look at the issues as a whole, and not bunch it in their departmental silos. A lot can be achieved with EU, and rest of the world with close cooperation and coordination domestically and abroad.
(The writer is a policy analyst. The views expressed are personal.)
