EU-India People’s Summit, 2021

 

Since last few years now, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi comes to Europe and ratifies various contracts with the European Union through the annual EU-India diplomatic Summits. In the year 2021, it was the 16^th edition of this event [1]. Initially, Mr. Modi was to come in person to Portugal to attend it. However, owing to a surge in Covid cases, he had to back off and the summit was instead held virtually [2].

We, a loosely held consortium of Indian diaspora groups in Europe, had made an appeal to the EU-India diplomatic summit authorities so that we could be invited to this session of the summit. Our wish and intention was to participate in what’s been decided and discussed on People’s behalf. Unfortunately, we were denied access to this diplomatic summit.

Organisation of the People’s summit

Owing to this denial, our collective of the diaspora groups decided to organize an online, People’s counter summit [3] [4]. This desire was indicative of the growing global wish of the people to participate in policy making and in governance. This reminds me of a famous quote by the former President of France, Charles DE GAULLE – “Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.”

The virtual People’s counter summit was held during 1-8 May 2021. It invited more than 80 speakers from Europe, India and around the world that included ex- ambassadors, parliamentarians, advocates, Intellectuals, journalists, writers, social scientists, students, etc. [5]. There were around 41 discussion panels [6]. Out of these, 38 were in English, 2 in French while 1 in German. The broad themes of discussions were; We The People, Urban Futures, Identity and Nations, Human Rights, Digital Democracy and Business & Human Rights…

The line-up of keynote speakers and panelists included High Commissioner of Foreign Trade and Relations of the European Parliament Alviina ALAMETSA, former National Security Adviser and climate expert Ambassador Shyam SARAN, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy Dr Joseph CANNATACI, prominent social scientists including Mukulika BANARJEE, Christophe JAFFRELOT, Audrey TRUSHKE and Catherine WIHTOL DE WENDEN. Prominent civil society activists, who addressed the summit, included Amir Ullah KHAN, Kavita KRISHNAN, Harsh MANDER, Gautam MODY, Ravi NAIR, Aakar PATEL, N. RAM, Pratik SINHA and Nikita SUD. More details about the panel speakers could be found at our website [5].

The summit was free and open to all. It was livestreamed on Twitter, You tube and Facebook [7].  For us, it was a festival of ideas that warranted easy and free access to all.

Objectives of the Summit

The organising diaspora groups recognized the 2020 EU-India Strategic Partnership: A Roadmap to 2025 document which aims at strengthening EU-India dialogue mechanisms and addresses a breadth of interrelated topics, including human and cyber security, human rights and fundamental freedoms, trade and market access, climate change and individual and collective responsibilities under the Paris Climate Agreement [8].

As we know, our problems have become increasingly trans-national, be it in the area of climate security, digital security, health security or income security. That’s why there is a need for a trans-national cooperation between civil societies. What are the lessons that Europe and India - two highly diverse and multi-cultural (imperfect) democracies - should learn from? And what should be our approach to trans-nationalism as a diaspora? These were some of the fundamental questions that were at the heart of the Summit. In essence, we wished that the future of democracy should be embedded in diplomacy and should progressively become open sourced, plural, democratic and a rights based collaboration between EU and India. Broadly, the idea was to bring people together, so that all the stake holders whose futures depend on these could participate.

It was also an opportunity for us to understand that the European Union isn’t a homogeneous entity. There is European Union and then there are member countries. Diplomacy, foreign relations and even trade are predominantly the prerogative of the member countries. For instance, the Rafale and other defense deals between India-France make it a prominent bilateral issue, bypassing the European Union. Thus, each European Union member country has a specific and dedicated bilateral relation with India, in addition to the EU-India aspect.

The organizing Indian diaspora groups

This Peoples Summit was jointly organised by Indian diaspora groups such as The London Story, Indian Solidarity - Finland, The Liberal Indians- France, Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC), International Solidarity for Academic Freedom in India (InSAF), South Asia Solidarity, Peace Vigil, Hindus for Human Rights, India Civil Watch International, Scottish Indians for Justice… amongst others. Although majority of the groups were from Europe, few were also from the United States, Australia, etc. Before conducting this summit, many of these groups were involved in activities such as organizing protests in their respective countries against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and against the abrogation of article 370, facilitating donations to help the affected during the 2020 Delhi riots, extending support to the 2020-2021 famers agitation, conducting twitter storms to raise issues that were overlooked by the mainstream Indian / International media, drafting of memorandums to EU and other parliamentarians & to the Indian Embassies to raise issues of concern, etc.

In spite of the decent number of participating diaspora groups, the number of active members was not more than 10 [9]. We all came from different professional backgrounds such as engineers, young advocates, research students, working mothers stationed at different geographical locations in Europe and in India. 

EU- India People’s Roadmap

After the summit, our organizing committee continued to work with the participating panelists so as to prepare an EU-India People’s Roadmap document that would inform our diplomacy and engagement with policy makers within Europe and India [10] [11]. The roadmap enumerated specific action points in the areas of digital democracy, human rights, and climate change. It called upon governments to position respect for human rights and human security at the core, by incorporating human rights into every clause, and also by regularly engaging with civil society through a comprehensive and continued EU-India Human Rights Dialogue.

In the preparation phase of the Roadmap, Amnesty India’s director Aakar Patel added:

“It is of utmost importance that governments are held accountable towards human rights violations in bilateral and multilateral relations in areas. Human rights must not be interpreted narrowly, but must feature centrally in debates all the way from climate change to complex surveillance”.

The roadmap was released on 15^th August 2021 and was communicated to members of the European Parliament’s delegation with India, including Jakop Dalunde; members of the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, including Alviina Alametsä; members of the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Human Rights, including Maria Arena; Members of the German Parliament, including Omid Nouripour, Deputy Chair of the Germany-India Friendship Group; Members of the Dutch Parliament, including Nilüfer Gündoğan; and others. Several of these Member of Parliament (MPs) and Member of European Parliament (MEPs) had already expressed their support for the spirit of the roadmap and had participated in the EU-India People Summit held from 1-8^th of May 2021.  

Personal Experience

I believe, there’s a common perception in India that most of the Non Residential Indians (NRIs) are pro Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) / Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This perception isn’t that incorrect, in particular if we talk about the Indian diaspora in USA (United States of America) and / or in United Kingdom (UK). In fact, there’s a book by the political commentator Sanjay BARU, India’s Power Elite, in which he criticizes NRIs for having abandoned India and Indians [12]. He claims that the NRIs have chosen a luxurious and safe life and yet some of them continue to give sermons through articles written in Indian / International newspapers about how Indians should mend their ways. In my view, as most of the NRIs are from upper castes and come from privileged classes (the way they occupy the higher echelons of the Indian society, in India), their political affiliations are mostly in tune with what they were while they were in India, or are similar to their Indian confreres. In that sense, they are quite coherent. But it needed to be shown that not all of the NRIs sing peons to the extremist regime in India. Further, it was important to highlight that although small in numbers, the Indian diaspora outside USA and UK was capable of making its presence felt, through constructive and meaningful collaborations. This summit gave a perfect opportunity in this regard.

It was for the first time in my life that I was going to directly interview and animate debates that included some of the most dedicated and exceptional minds from India and Europe, and that too with no prior training / education in the field ! Before the summit, we all had been working tirelessly for weeks preparing for different organizational aspects such as contacting and coordinating with the panelists, preparing for individual sessions that we were personally going to moderate, developing the website, managing publicity for the event, drafting press releases, giving interviews to the media houses, scheduling live stream telecast, coordinating Zoom invitations, etc. It was a great learning process.

On my part, I got an opportunity to moderate two sessions. One on “Populism and Nationalism in European Union and in India” [13] while another on “Refugees and Border Securitization” [14]. The moderators had a free hand at choosing the panel for the discussion as well as for formulating the format of the exchange. For my first session, the panelists included Mukulika BANERJEE of London School of Economics, Sandra DESTRADI of University of Freiburg, Germany, Christophe JAFFRELOT of SciencePo (Institut d'études politiques de Paris), Paris and Sten WIDMALM of University Uppsala, Sweden. While for the second session, the panelists were Ravi NAIR of South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre in Delhi, Marie-Caroline SAGLIO of Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) in Paris, Ranabir SAMADDAR of Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, and Catherine WIHTOL DE WENDEN, a Paris based French political scientist.

As a sequel to this session, we are planning to organize a second EU-India Peoples’s summit in 2024 which most probably will have a hybrid (physical and virtual) format.

We hope that regular organization of such summits would strengthen Peoples’s legitimate stake in policymaking and in governance all over the world. Let democracies be democratized!