India and EDIP: The Limits of Defence-Industrial Cooperation
What the law allows, what viable cooperation would require, and where the real constraints remain
India is becoming a more important defence partner for the European Union at the political level, and European industry already has a meaningful footprint in the Indian market through manufacturing, localisation, maintenance, and selected weapons-related partnerships. Yet this does not mean that India is already an operational partner under the European Defence Industry Programme. The central issue is narrower and more exacting: whether a politically deeper relationship and an existing industrial presence can be translated into legally admissible and operationally viable cooperation under a programme designed to protect Union control, limit third-country influence, and preserve design authority, security, and supply-chain discipline within a tightly defined legal perimeter.
The report is structured as a legal-industrial feasibility test. It begins by reconstructing the actual EDIP baseline directly from Regulation (EU) 2025/2643 and correcting common misunderstandings about which provisions matter for third-country participation. It then separates this legal framework from the official EU-India political and diplomatic architecture, examines India’s own defence-industrial and procurement logic, and maps the existing industrial presence of key European actors in India. On that basis, it assesses what a legally viable cooperation model would have to look like under EDIP, which forms of India-linked cooperation are realistically conceivable, and whether the decisive barriers are legal, industrial, procurement-related, or political-administrative.