NEW DELHI – Giorgia Meloni she leaves New Delhi with a bust of Gandhi received as a gift at the Raj Ghat and in her ears the motif of a tarantella dedicated to her by a player of the sitar, a typical local instrument. But her premier, who arrived in India with her daughter Geneva, brings with her above all the certainty of a consolidation of relations with Narendra Modithe ultra-nationalist premier to whom he dedicated over the top words of praise: “I hope to have the approval rating of the Indian prime minister who, as we know, is the most loved leader in the world“.
It is the culmination of a political marriage that has risen to the rank of “strategic partnership”: Modi, on the other hand, represents the conservative Right and a rigid line against immigration. It has great geopolitical and economic appeal. It matters little if the Indian head of government is a controversial figure, endowed with enormous consensus but an exponent of an “imperfect democracy” or “electoral autocracy”, to use the expressions that think tanks adopted in 2021 Freedom House e V-them.
Modi, whose image is featured on thousands of posters in New Delhi, is the idol of the Hindu majority but is accused of stifling the rights of the Muslim minority. Meanwhile, India has dropped to 150th place (out of 180) for press freedom. And recently censorship was triggered on a documentary by Bbc which denounces Modi’s alleged responsibilities in failing to properly oppose the killing of hundreds of Muslims during some clashes that took place in 2002 in the state of Gujarat, of which he was governor at the time.
But alongside the shadows there are the lights of a rapidly expanding country, which aims to become the world‘s third largest economy by the end of the decade and which this year is trying to make the most of the opportunity offered by the G20 presidency.
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Meloni, at the end of the face-to-face meeting with the Indian leader, praises the “extremely solid” bilateral relations and underlines the trade exchange which has reached the record figure of almost 15 billion euros, doubling the volume in the last two years.
“Ours is a strategic choice, when we talk about the enlarged Mediterranean we must consider it enlarged up to here”, the Italian premier goes so far as to say, with reference to the attention that Rome wants to give to the Indo-Pacific to contain the rise of the China.
There are two fields of action, strengthened by agreements involving large companies such as Leonardo ed Enel: defense and energy security. In the first sector, New Delhi presents itself with investments of more than 200 billion lire and therefore as the ideal interlocutor for the purpose of obtaining significant orders to modernize the Indian war system. But there is interest in other fields as well, such as ecological transition and emerging technologies. The foreign minister Antonio Tajani on the sidelines of the G20 summit, he co-chaired a meeting with the main Italian companies: 600 have established their presence in the country, in particular in the industrial districts of Delhi and Mumbai/Pune.