The defence calculus behind PM Modi’s Europe visit

For most of the last three decades, India’s defence ties with Europe followed a familiar pattern. A government would identify a requirement, run a tender that dragged on for years, and eventually sign a contract. In most cases for finished equipment, rarely for technology, almost never for manufacturing. The Rafale deal took the better part of a decade. The submarine programme with France moved in fits and starts. Europe was a supplier. India was a buyer. The relationship rarely demanded more from either side.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s May 2026 European visit to the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Italy clearly suggests that the arrangement is over.

But the first stop on this tour wasn’t in Europe, but the UAE, specifically Abu Dhabi, where he spent four hours before flying to Amsterdam. In that brief stopover, India and the UAE signed a strategic defence partnership on joint industrial production, advanced technology, maritime security, cyber defence and secure communications. And then Europe came calling.

More from Opinion

The Netherlands

The most commercially striking outcome from The Hague was the agreement between ASML, the Dutch company that manufactures the lithography machines used to produce almost every advanced chip in the world, and Tata Electronics, to support India’s first semiconductor fabrication plant in Dholera, Gujarat. What is its significance?

Semiconductors underpin communication systems, encryption technologies, radar systems, missile guidance and electronic warfare. In radar systems specifically, chips are used in high-frequency amplifiers and signal processing components. In electronic warfare, semiconductor-based countermeasures disrupt enemy communications and radar. Every missile guidance system, every airborne radar, every encrypted communication terminal runs on semiconductors. In short, a country cannot truly indigenise its defence production unless it manufactures its own chips.

ASML’s lithography technology will enable India eventually to manufacture the chips that go into the weapons systems it builds, contributing significantly to PM Modi’s Aatmanirbhar Bharat vision.

The Netherlands and India also signed a Letter of Intent on Defence Cooperation and agreed to work towards a Defence Industrial Roadmap covering co-development, technology transfer, joint ventures and co-production. The broader security framework agreed upon covers maritime security, counter-terrorism, cyber security, and critical and emerging technologies.

Sweden

Sweden’s contribution to this tour is best understood through one specific fact. Saab is constructing a manufacturing facility in Jhajjar, Haryana, for the Carl-Gustaf M4 recoilless rifle system. It is the company’s first production unit for the weapon outside Sweden, and India’s first 100 per cent FDI-driven foreign defence manufacturing plant. This is not a licensed production arrangement where a foreign company ships parts to India and handles the intellectual property from a distance. This is a wholly foreign-owned defence facility operating on Indian sovereign territory, subject to Indian oversight, producing weapons for the Indian armed forces and potentially for export.

That represents a qualitative shift in how a European defence company views its relationship with India. Saab has placed productive capital inside India’s borders. The strategic trust embedded in that decision exceeds what most bilateral frameworks formally articulate.

The bilateral relationship was elevated to a full Strategic Partnership during the visit, backed by a Joint Action Plan for 2026-2030. The two countries also endorsed the India-Sweden Technology and Artificial Intelligence Corridor, the SITAC initiative, covering AI, 6G and quantum computing. These technologies are the foundational layer of next-generation warfare: autonomous systems, communications dominance, real-time battlefield intelligence and electronic warfare. Sweden’s rare earth deposits, among the largest in Europe and essential to defence electronics, battery systems and modern weapons propulsion, add another dimension. India is building access to that supply chain through a strategic partnership.

The bilateral trade target of doubling within five years, framed against the India-EU Free Trade Agreement signed earlier this year, gives Swedish defence companies a cleaner pathway to integrate their Indian operations into a wider European and global supply chain. India is not positioning itself as a customer. It is becoming a co-production platform.

Norway

The highlight here is that it was an Indian Prime Minister’s first bilateral visit to Norway in 43 years. Norway has deep knowledge of the ocean. Norwegian institutions lead the world in subsurface oceanography, deep-sea monitoring and underwater geological mapping — the knowledge base on which anti-submarine warfare capability is built, and on which deep-sea communications infrastructure is planned. The CSIR-NGRI partnership with Emerald Geomodelling and the CSIR-SINTEF collaboration signed during the visit create working relationships between Indian and Norwegian scientists who understand what lies beneath the water.

That matters now more than ever as India’s naval ambitions grow. India is still mapping its own seabed for oil in the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, but also because China has been running survey vessels through the Indian Ocean for years, collecting data that tells you where to drill and, just as usefully, where submarines patrol, where they hide, and how they evade detection.

The tunnel and slope stability agreement, framed around the Char Dham Railway, is another case where the civilian label understates the strategic content. Norwegian engineers who consult on mountain tunnelling through seismically active terrain are drawing on the same knowledge that informs hardened underground military infrastructure. Countries that think about the survivability of their command systems and supply lines invest in this expertise. India is now investing in a partnership that gives it access to it.

The Third India-Nordic Summit in Oslo gave New Delhi the platform formally to propose an India-Nordic Arctic cooperation mechanism. The Arctic is no longer just about climate change. It is about shipping lanes that could reshape global trade, resources that great powers are already positioning to access, and a governance vacuum that China and Russia are both working to fill.

Italy

India and Italy have had a complicated recent history. The 2012 shooting of two Indian fishermen by Italian marines triggered a diplomatic crisis that lasted years. Two years later, India cancelled a helicopter contract with AgustaWestland, a subsidiary of what is now Leonardo, after a bribery scandal implicated the deal. Three helicopters had already been delivered. The remaining nine were sent back. The relationship between the two defence establishments effectively went cold.

The meeting between PM Modi and his Italian counterpart, Giorgia Meloni, in Rome in May 2026 marks the formal end of that. The two countries elevated ties to a “Special Strategic Partnership” and agreed on a Defence Industrial Roadmap covering helicopters, naval platforms, marine armament and electronic warfare.

The ground was prepared before the summit. In January 2026, an MoU was signed with Leonardo to build a helicopter manufacturing ecosystem in India, covering indigenisation, maintenance and overhaul facilities, and pilot training for the Indian armed forces. The roadmap signed in Rome elevates that corporate agreement into a government-backed framework.

Italy’s Fincantieri is one of the few shipbuilders in the world with genuine capability in complex naval vessels. The Maritime Security Dialogue launched in Rome creates the channel through which something concrete can be developed. The IMEEC dimension reinforces the urgency. Italy’s ports at Trieste and Genoa sit at the European end of a corridor that runs through the Arabian Sea and the Gulf. Keeping that route functional requires naval coordination between the countries anchoring its two ends.

The conversation that nobody in Rome was having on the record is about the Global Combat Air Programme. GCAP is the sixth-generation fighter initiative run by the UK, Italy and Japan, with Leonardo as one of three lead industrial partners. In March 2026, India’s Chief of Defence Staff, General Anil Chauhan, said that India is evaluating entry into either GCAP or the Franco-German FCAS. The Indian Air Force flies roughly 29 operational squadrons, which it aspires to increase to 42 by the year 2035. Italy is aware of this arithmetic. The Defence Industrial Roadmap signed in Rome does not mention GCAP by name. It does not need to.

Why Now, and What It Adds Up To

The timing of this tour is not accidental. It comes one year after Operation Sindoor, India’s precision cross-border air strikes following the Pahalgam massacre, in which Indian systems performed in live combat conditions. India’s demonstrated capability during Operation Sindoor included the Akash system, BrahMos cruise missiles, and Tata Advanced Systems’ ALS-50 loitering munitions. The performance changed how European defence ministries read India. A country that has proven its systems under fire, raised its defence budget by 15.2 per cent in FY27, and reserved over Rs 1.11 lakh crore for domestic procurement is not looking for suppliers. It is looking for partners.

The web of agreements assembled across The Hague, Stockholm, Oslo and Rome, each node contributing something distinct, reflects exactly that. Dutch semiconductor and co-development frameworks. Swedish manufacturing presence on Indian soil. Norwegian maritime and undersea domain knowledge. Italian aerospace pathways into the next generation of combat aviation. None of these, individually, transforms India’s defence posture. Together, over the decade ahead, they underwrite the industrial and technological sovereignty that a nation of 1.4 billion people, in a neighbourhood as contested as India’s, has every reason to build.

PM Modi’s European visit is about ensuring that the weapons and systems India builds can be sustained, upgraded and expanded at its pace, on its terms, and without dependence on anyone else’s strategic calendar. That is what a rising power does. And that is what this visit was ultimately about.

(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)