German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is set to arrive in New Delhi late on Thursday to co-chair — along with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi — the 7th Intergovernmental Consultations (IGC) between India and Germany.
There is anticipation that this year’s IGC could herald a new era in India-German ties as it comes on the heels of Germany adopting the “Focus on India” paper last week.
What are Scholz and Modi discussing in New Delhi?
“The German government wants to raise the strategic partnership that has underpinned our relationship with India since 2000 to a new level. The first steps towards implementation are to be agreed at the next Indo-German intergovernmental consultations,” Germany’s Foreign Office said.
Germany’s ambassador to India, Philipp Ackermann, said Germany has not issued such a paper with any other country.
“It is a clear signal that ahead of this intergovernmental consultations, the German government sat together and agreed upon a holistic approach on their India policy,” Ackermann told reporters on Tuesday.
The two-day consultations will begin on Friday.
“Both leaders will hold bilateral talks to discuss enhanced security and defense cooperation, greater opportunities for mobility of talent, deeper economic cooperation, green and sustainable development partnership and collaboration in the area of emerging and strategic technologies,” India’s Ministry of External Affairs said in a press release on Monday.
German ministers arrive for key business conference
The IGC also coincides with the Asia Pacific Conference of German Business, which is scheduled to launch on Thursday evening.
German Economy Minister Robert Habeck, who is set toco-chair the conference, arrived in New Delhi in the early hours of Thursday along with Labor Minister Hubertus Heil and a vast business delegation.
On Thursday, Heil is expected to visit a school in New Delhi that prepares young Indians for a three-year vocational training program in Germany.
Meanwhile, Chancellor Scholz and Prime Minister Modi will address the conference on Friday. Modi will be returning from Russia where he took part in the BRICS summit.
Nearly 650 top business leaders and CEOs from Germany, India, and other countries are expected to participate in the conference, according to the Indian Foreign Ministry.
A ‘turning point’ for India-German relations?
The IGC, which was launched in 2011, is a whole-of-government framework under which ministers from both countries hold discussions in their respective fields of responsibility and report on the outcome of their ruminations to the Prime Minister and Chancellor.
India is among a select few countries with which Germany has such a high-level dialogue apparatus.
New Delhi and Berlin say that the format allows for a comprehensive review of cooperation and identification of new areas of engagement.
India and Germany are now looking at their relationship through the lens of the shifting geopolitical landscape around them.
Some political observers have opined that there is somewhat of a “Zeitenwende” or turning point in India-German ties.
“I think the changing political shifts with the war in Ukraine and another war in the Middle East has brought a focus on how do you transform your partnerships,” Ummu Salma Bava, a political scientist at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, told DW’s Delhi bureau chief Sandra Petersmann.
“I think we could then use the term Zeitenwende over here,” Bava added. “But then we’ll have to do a lot of hard work to live up to that idea that it is a Zeitenwende.”
Edited by: Zac Crellin