Coming at the back of a recently signed India-EU Free Trade Agreement as well as the India-EFTA Trade and Economic Partnership Agreement (TEPA) signed with Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Gothenburg and his subsequent appearance at an India-Nordic summit in Oslo were, on the surface, about familiar themes: innovation, green transition, AI, and advanced manufacturing.
However, the trip might also catalyze the emergence of a more consequential story. The industrial and technological domains that were tabled in Gothenburg are not merely commercial opportunities; they are also precisely the competencies that any serious Arctic player needs. Taken alongside India’s existing Himadri research station in Svalbard and its growing interest in Arctic shipping routes, therefore, Modi’s Nordic tour could also be interpreted as the opening move in a deliberate strategy to build India’s High North credentials through partnerships with the Nordic states: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.
Look at what was actually agreed in Gothenburg. The India-Sweden bilateral relationship was formally upgraded to a strategic partnership, structured around four substantive pillars: a security and defense dialogue, a next-generation economic partnership, emerging technologies (including cooperation on AI, 6G, quantum computing, and space), and the green transition. Crucially, the two sides have also committed to doubling bilateral trade and investment within five years with a dedicated Bilateral Trade and Investment Summit planned in India for 2027.
The momentum carried into Oslo, Norway, where the India-Nordic relationship as a whole was formally elevated to a “trusted Green Technology and Innovation Strategic Partnership,” a framing that captures both the commercial and the geopolitical ambitions. Separately, India and Norway upgraded their bilateral ties to a “green strategic partnership” underpinned by 12 agreements spanning clean energy, the blue economy, green shipping, and scientific research. Oslo also formally joined the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative.
The space dimension is particularly telling. During the visit, Sweden formally joined India’s Shukrayaan mission to Venus. The Swedish Institute of Space Physics agreed to develop a specialized instrument, the Venusian Neutrals Analyzer, that will fly aboard the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) Venus orbiter. Norway added its own dimension to this space architecture with the Norwegian Space Agency and ISRO signing a framework agreement on cooperation in the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes.
Taken in isolation, these are significant scientific collaborations. Place them in the context of the Arctic’s emergence as a global space hub, however, and they signal something much more, strategically speaking, fundamental. Sweden, home to Europe’s only orbital satellite launch complex, and Norway have chosen to deepen their space partnerships with India at precisely the moment India is asserting Arctic ambitions. Geopolitically, this matters because the space sector is among the domains where India has traditionally had a long and deep working relation with Russia. Its new partnerships with Sweden and Norway, therefore, might indicate a deliberate move by New Delhi to, if not reduce, then at least diversify its outer space partners pool.
Sweden’s Arctic endowment adds further strategic weight to the partnership. Northern Sweden is home to Europe’s largest deposit of rare earth elements, a discovery that has elevated Sweden’s geopolitical standing considerably at a moment when China’s dominance of rare earth supply chains is widely considered a strategic vulnerability for the West. India, for its part, has launched its own National Critical Mineral Mission, and Modi explicitly invited Swedish companies to participate in it during his Gothenburg visit. The convergence of India’s mineral processing ambitions with Sweden’s raw material endowment and technological knowhow in sustainable mining create a potential basis for mutual leverage that neither side has yet made explicit but that could become a significant pillar of the relationship.
The obstacle to all of these possibilities, however, remains significant: Russia.
India is, or at least was until very recently, Russia’s second-largest supplier of restricted technologies. That led the United States to sanction 19 Indian firms for links to the Russian war economy towards the end of 2024. Putting aside the historical ties between India and Russia, New Delhi has also pledged to grow bilateral trade with Moscow to $100 billion by 2030.
For the Nordic states, these are core concerns that underpin a degree of strategic anxiety that Indian policymakers ought not to underestimate. Their worry is not that India would deliberately redirect Nordic technology to Moscow. Rather, it is that dual-use knowhow has a way of migrating through opaque supply chains, and India’s sanctions record offers them little comfort.
Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store gave this anxiety a pointed public expression in Oslo, telling a group of Indian journalists that while Norway respects India’s need to source energy from Russia, he hopes New Delhi can use its channels with Moscow to help effect a ceasefire in Ukraine. The comment is diplomatically significant in that it simultaneously acknowledges India’s constraints and signals an expectation that those ties be put to constructive use. This constitutes a form of conditional tolerance that New Delhi should read carefully.
This anxiety acquires sharper edges when one considers the specific domains now on the table. The Joint Action Plan between India and Sweden covers semiconductors, defense innovation, and advanced manufacturing – all of which are, to varying degrees, considered as dual-use goods. India has also invited Swedish companies to invest in its defense production corridors. The India-Nordic joint statement, similarly, specified “increased momentum in defense cooperation” and underlined the importance of defense industrial collaboration while flagging the 100 percent FDI window being offered to Nordic defense firms in Indian Defense Industrial Corridors.
Put bluntly, Indian officials would be making a serious miscalculation if they were to assume that their Nordic counterparts are unaware of what this implies; that they are being asked to share sensitive knowhow in AI, space, and advanced manufacturing against the backdrop of India’s deepening entanglement with Russia. These are not domains in which Nordic states share capabilities lightly, and New Delhi should expect that any substantive transfer will be contingent on credible safeguards.
If India is serious about the Arctic and its emerging partnership with the Nordic states both individually and as a group, New Delhi should be prepared to meet Nordic partners on their terms. That means engaging candidly with their security concerns vis-a-vis Russia instead of treating them as overreaction, and accepting that partnership architecture may need explicit guardrails around technology transfer. The rewards would be worth it. Nordic partnership offers India legitimacy, institutional access, and a hedge against the vulnerabilities its Russia relationship keeps creating. The joint India-Nordic statement, in fact, offers a glimpse of what such legitimacy looks like in practice. All five Nordic heads of government confirmed their support for India’s permanent membership of a reformed and expanded United Nations Security Council.
The good news is that the newly signed agreements with Sweden and Norway, especially if replicated with other Nordic states, could provide the scaffolding for exactly this kind of structured assurance. The Joint Innovation Partnership 2.0 and the proposed India-Sweden Joint Science and Technology Center could be designed from the outset with technology transfer protocols embedded in their governance structures, rather than bolted on as an afterthought. Similarly, India and Sweden have agreed to regular “exchanges between the National Security Council Secretariat of India and the Office of the National Security Advisor of Sweden on issues of mutual interest.” This can be used to narrow the gap between the two sides’ respective threat perceptions and strategic concerns with regard to Russia and a range of other issues.
On the Arctic specifically, the joint India-Nordic statement acknowledged the growing interlinkages between the Arctic and Indo-Pacific regions and welcomed India’s continued and constructive engagement in the Arctic Council’s working groups and expert bodies. This is careful, incremental language that stops short of the binding Arctic mechanism New Delhi was hoping for, but that at least institutionalizes the conversation
Modi’s northern swing could sketch a genuine blueprint for India’s evolving Arctic strategy; one hinged on the principle of diplomatic diversification whereby New Delhi works with both the Nordics and Russia in the Arctic without one relationship cannibalizing the other. For that to materialize, both India and the Nordic states need to do something neither finds easy: accept managed ambiguity. The Nordics need to recognize that India’s Russia relationship, however uncomfortable, is not going away, and that excluding India from Arctic cooperation on those grounds only pushes New Delhi further into Moscow’s orbit. India, for its part, ought to demonstrate credible commitment to technology safeguards even if doing so could constrain the scope of partnership. Store’s public appeal to Modi to leverage India’s Russia ties for peace in Ukraine is, in its own way, an invitation to exactly this kind of managed ambiguity: acknowledgement that India’s proximity to Moscow is a fact of life, paired with an expectation that it be directed toward shared ends.
The architecture for such an undertaking is now in place thanks, in no small part, to the signed bilateral and minilateral strategic partnerships. The issue to watch is whether the current political goodwill on both sides will prove durable enough over the long run and in the face of future geopolitical shocks.
