Bigger Than Defence: The Unsung Aspect Of PM Modi's Visit To France

The main objectives of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to France this week, listed by the press almost to exclusion, are a slew of important defence deals.

They include Rafale fighter jets for the Indian Navy’s latest aircraft carrier, the INS Vikrant; three Scorpene submarines; and the transfer of jet engine technology from the French company Safran, for development and manufacture in India.

Yet, as Swarajya's analyses reveal, the list is not just larger, but has major geopolitical implications as well. Once again, India and France’s interests are perfectly aligned.

With excellent timing, news broke late last month that the Indian oil ministry had held talks with Total Energies, the French oil and gas major, for the recommencement of construction operations at a mega Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) terminal at the northern coast of Mozambique.

Work on the project had to be stopped in 2021 by invoking emergency force majeure clauses, and teams withdrawn, because of incessant terrorist attacks by an indigenous Islamist insurgent group named Ansar Al Sunnah.

This LNG project is a joint venture between Total of France, Mitsui of Japan, PTTEP — the national petroleum exploration and production company of Thailand, the national oil company of Mozambique, and three Indian public sector undertakings: ONGC Videsh, Bharat Petroleum, and Oil India Ltd.

It is located onshore near the Tanzanian border, in the province of Cabo Delgado, and is designed to liquefy and export large volumes of natural gas discovered in the past decade, in the offshore Rovuma sedimentary basin.

This remarkably prolific basin runs south to north through deep waters, and more such large discoveries lie in Tanzanian waters. The Mozambican part of the Rovuma basin is estimated to hold around 150 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of gas, and the Tanzanian part, over 50 Tcf.

That is a lot of natural gas.

To put this volume in some perspective, it is about a sixth of the gas Russia or Iran have, a quarter of what Qatar has, and about half of all the natural gas in Asia, with more exploratory drilling still in the works.

The first offshore gas discovery was made in 2010 by Anadarko, an American oil and gas exploration company. It was a heaven-sent bonanza for Mozambique, which is one of the poorest countries on earth. And this is where the story gets interesting.

By 2015, Anadarko had drilled enough, and discovered enough gas, to start work on an LNG export terminal at Palma, in Cabo Delgado, just a few miles south of the border with Tanzania, and the Rovuma River, from which the offshore basin takes its name.

Soon thereafter, Ansar Al Sunnah made its first appearance in Cabo Delgado, which just happened to be the only Muslim-dominated province in Mozambique. The group’s demand was a separate state, and their first major terrorist attack was in early 2017.

This was a startling development in a country with no prior history of separatism, and which was, quite frankly, too poor to afford terrorism. But then, fossil fuels have an odd way of bringing dark forces to life.

By 2019, the situation got so bad that Anadarko was forced to sell its stake to recoup losses.

That participatory interest in the gas fields and the LNG project was taken over by Total, who continued with construction activities as best as they could. But as the terrorist attacks mounted, Total was forced to suspend the project in 2021.

Strangely, terrorism started to ebb in Cabo Delgado province with Total’s departure, and Ansar Al Sunnah shifted their focus to mining operations hundreds of kilometre to the south. Over the course of 2022, those attacks too began to wane, and none were reported after September of that year.

And that is how things stood in an uneasy abeyance, until Indian foreign minister, Dr S Jaishankar, made an official visit to Mozambique in April 2023. It was the second leg of a six-day-long two-nation visit which began in Kampala, Uganda.

While there was no direct reference to the LNG project in any of his public statements, Dr Jaishankar did point out at the India-Mozambique Joint Commission meeting, that India had made a substantial investment of 11 billion dollars in Mozambique, ‘largely in the domain of energy and mining’.

The next step was a meeting between Pankaj Jain, India’s Petroleum Secretary, and Patrick Pouyanne, CEO of Total, in May 2023.

This was followed by another bit of news. Denis Favier, head of Total’s security, visited the LNG site in early June 2023.

He spent three days surveying the ground situation, after which he had detailed discussions with the military head of the region’s counter-terrorism task force, and the Defence Minister of Mozambique.

Look at the amount of pre-planning and legwork that has been undertaken at the very highest levels, to revive a stalled mega-project.

Sadly, there are no prizes for guessing what happened days after, when Total’s plans to restart construction activities at the LNG plant became public: after many months of peace and quiet, two people were killed in separate incidents in the area south of Cabo Delgado by terrorists (called insurgents, locally) on 30 June and 1 July.

Total was back, and so was Ansar Al Sunnah.What are we to make of this? As the saying goes, ‘Aap chronology samajiye’.For the Indian government, this is a multi-faceted matter.

Commissioning the LNG plant unlocks significant Indian investments in Mozambique and monetizes them. It secures substantial gas supplies for a generation, from giant fields in which Indian companies have a stake (meaning India will have on-site control of the supply source). The returns over the coming decades will be huge.

It ties in neatly with India’s interests in a similar LNG export terminal set to come up on the Tanzanian coast (read here about Dr Jaishankar’s visit to the country last week); and with our focus on accessing huge oil reserves discovered in the Albertine sedimentary basin of Uganda.

A crude oil pipeline routed to run from Lake Albert to the Tanzanian coast has, unsurprisingly, already attracted severe censure from a host of agencies, ranging from the United Nations to the European parliament.

The penny will drop for readers when they learn that the operator of this oil pipeline project, scheduled to bring a quarter of a million barrels of new oil to the global market, is Total of France.

The company was accused of human rights abuses in Uganda by the European parliament, in a resolution passed in just two swift days, and without following the standard procedure of inviting explanations from the company being censured.

Tanzania, Uganda, and Mozambique combined, also tie in with India’s broader energy security objectives, of establishing more sources of secure hydrocarbons supply in the Indian Ocean Region, from friendly nations with whom we have old, old, links, across waters which fall in our sphere of influence.

So, to conclude, what’s going on? If an obscure Islamist terrorist group appears in a region with no history of terrorism, soon after the discovery of world-class hydrocarbon reserves, and stalls their extraction by driving away not one but two energy majors, then one may infer by logical deduction that someone is trying to keep new LNG off the market.

Who might that be? Who benefits from keeping new LNG off the market?

Obviously, those who captured the most market share in the past decade. A chart below tells it all.

No wonder Prime Minister Modi pointedly remarked in his recent interview to a French publication, that India and France ‘are the two major resident powers in the Indian Ocean region’. It was an emphatic reminder to ‘whomsoever it may concern’, that India will not be thwarted in its efforts to ensure its own energy security.

And no wonder India is pushing so hard for the African Union to be included as a full member of the G20 grouping. This is how a country becomes the voice of the ‘Global South’.

That is why, in its own way, not only is Modi’s visit to France more important than his visit to America last month, but restarting the LNG project has more strategic value than the purchase of military platforms as well, for both India and France.This is the game, and India is finally showing that it knows how to play it well.