India and Germany need to find common ground

However, two ingredients stood out — defence cooperation and the migration of skilled workers from India to Germany to help repair what was once Europe’s most powerful economy. Germany’s defence industry had begun wooing India to up its fortunes more than a decade ago. Its Eurofighter may have lost out to France’s Dassault Rafale as the choice of medium-range aircraft for the Indian Air Force(IAF), but excitement swelled again soon. This time, India urgently needed six submarines. Defence watchers confirmed that Germany’s TK-MS and Spain’s Navantia are in the reckoning and that the Navy itself had expressed its preference for the former. Chancellor Scholz’s visit seemed a perfect occasion for the historic announcement.

But when a sudden ailment forced German defence minister Boris Pistorius to cancel his India trip just before last Friday’s exchange of agreements at Hyderabad House, it was obvious that there was going to be no deal. “There are technical issues,” said a senior former Indian diplomat. “Germany needs to push more diplomatically.” Spain’s President, Pedro Sanchez, is now in India.

At practically every forum last week, the Germans also issued energetic invitations to Indians to move to Germany. From students to nurses to hospital caregivers to IT engineers, Germany wants them all. There are already 1,37,000 Indian professionals and students in Germany, and thousands more are needed. Now, that’s nice. This writer remembers a time when coconuts were cracked at the feet of Lord Balaji to ensure even a mere transit visa through Frankfurt airport.

But some of the statements made by Germany last week were deeply puzzling. “Given the high numbers of unemployed school and college graduates (in India), even India is interested in placing qualified people on the German labour market,” claimed Berlin government sources, ahead of Scholz’s visit. That India is trying to solve its problem of youth unemployment by itself pushing for a brain drain is a startling claim. In 2023 alone, 4,86,000 Indians moved out of India, mostly to the United Kingdom and the United States. However, New Delhi has always tried to stem, not encourage this trend.

Then, at his very first press conference in New Delhi, deputy chancellor Robert Habeck put his foot even deeper into it, by adding a clumsy caveat. “We have to increase our workforce. We are an ageing society, India is a young, growing society. Therefore we can combine both challenges. If it helps India to bring people to work to gain experience, they are more than welcome to come to Germany. Many Indians are learning German… it’s an invitation to come to Germany. We would benefit from it. But we don’t want to steal your talent. So the hope is, that if (Indians) work there for 8-12 years, and come back with the knowledge that they have learnt in Germany, both economies would benefit.”

Does Germany need Indian talent to help revitalise its economy? Or, are the Germans living up to their globally notorious, didactic tendency, by imagining that Indians, who have the choice of settling anywhere, will take up temporary jobs in Germany to learn something invaluable there and go home?

Even when a former German government first invited Indian students to its universities more than a decade ago, it was on the absurd assumption that Indians would be ecstatic to first struggle with a difficult language, get German degrees and then, “return to India with the knowledge thus acquired”, as the then German envoy had declared to flummoxed kids at a students’ fair in New Delhi.

India’s external affairs ministry has indeed launched an e-portal for migrating Indians. But it is largely intended as a safety net against fraudulent recruitment agencies, not as a job portal to urge its own talent to leave. No Indian government would commit harakiri by doing so.

There is no doubt that the recent visit by Scholz put the giant strides made in the bilateral relationship between India and Germany over the past decades on welcome display. But a wide chasm persists between the la la land that politicians in Berlin inhabit, and what really goes down on the streets of especially small, eastern German cities when Indians are afoot. Social media channels are awash with accounts of young Indians who live there.

Undoubtedly, we Indians have many annoying public habits and often show scant regard for other cultures. But some of these young people point to nuanced racism — losing “English-speaking” jobs to less qualified white English speakers, hostile neighbours complaining of “garlic and onion odours” from Indian kitchens, and so on.

Surprisingly, among those welcoming Indians to Germany is the Right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) itself, the party which is treated as a political untouchable by Scholz’s current coalition, even though it won elections into three eastern parliaments through a democratic vote and has, like the extreme Left, weakened the ruling dispensation. “Germany isn’t a classic immigration country, so it sometimes takes a little longer for people to warm up to each other,” AfD MP Leif-Erik Holm told this writer. Holm says that it is “uncontrolled mass migration” that has led to a rise in crime and misguided hostility even towards hardworking legal migrants like Indians.

All German mainstream parties have refused to form coalitions with AfD in the eastern states. They even want it banned. But if Scholz and his team want to do well in next year’s national election, perhaps it is time to think again.

Padma Rao Sundarji is former South Asia bureau chief of German news magazine Der Spiegel and an independent foreign correspondent. The views expressed are personal