indo germany

But that is where the similarity between Germany and India ends. How the two nations are likely to relate to each other will depend on how they deal with an important dissimilarity. Post-World War II Germany, like post-War Japan, chose to shy away from geopolitics and rose, instead, as a geo-economic power. It is only recently that both Germany and Japan have tried to leverage their geo-economic power to recover geopolitical influence in their respective regions.

This is happening precisely at a time when India is pursuing a more aggressive developmental agenda, giving greater importance to geo-economics over geopolitics. While old-fashioned analysts bemoan India’s inability to get its neighbours to ‘behave’ — look at Maldives, Nepal and, till recently Sri Lanka — the more forward-looking thinkers take the view that for India to play a larger geopolitical role in Asia and around the world, it must first become a more competitive and productive economy.

There is a common strategic view that economic and social development on the domestic front and the provision of livelihood security to people are the only routes to national security and global influence. Therefore, India’s natural partners would be countries that, on the one hand, do not compete with it either in the marketplace or in power politics, and, on the other, have something to offer India that it lacks. By assisting India in the quest for development and geo-economic growth, Germany and Japan have the opportunity to bolster their own rise in geopolitical terms.

For all these reasons, Japan and Germany are India’s “natural allies”. They have surplus capital, modern technology and a demographic deficit. India has a deficit of capital, lacks modern technology and has exportable human capital. Unfortunately, language has remained a barrier in both cases, as Indians have mostly preferred to deal with the English-speaking world.

Ms. Merkel’s message to India next week will be that language is no longer a barrier. Searching the Internet for information on how Indians living in Germany feel about the country, one discovers a whole new world of growing compatibility. Answering questions on what it feels like to live in Germany on the website www.quora.com, most Indians draw attention to how Germans have become more welcoming of Indians.

Some of the views exchanged on Indo-German relations on the Internet show that a new generation of Indians and Germans are, in fact, approaching each other with very little knowledge of or baggage from their past. This is not entirely for the good, since India and Germany have much to celebrate in their past. German Indologists, Max Müller the best known among them, have been important contributors to the Western appreciation of Indian culture and history.

A shared view of the world will unlock many doors. It can help breathe new life into the negotiations on an India-European Union (EU) free trade agreement (FTA). Germany should encourage its European partners to give up their defensive and narrow approach to an FTA with India and adopt, instead, a more strategic view based on an understanding that an economically stronger India and a competitive EU can only help realise their shared agenda of creating a multi-polar global power system.