Hello and welcome to the CER podcast, Unpacking Europe.

I'm Ananita Chandrushika, the annual Clara Marina O'Donnell Fellow, and today I'm joined by Tara Varma,

currently a visiting fellow at Brookings Institution Center for the US and Europe,

and former head of ECFR's Paris office.

Anamaya Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Institute Montan, covering South Asia and India,

and a professor at IE University, who has previously managed a South Asia portfolio for EU ISS.

Welcome to you both. In this episode, we'll be discussing the recent momentum in EU-India relations

after the unprecedented visit of the European Commission to India last one and also consider any potential challenges on the horizon.

I'd like to start then by asking you both what you think the significance of this visit was

and what both sides were hoping for.

Thank you so much, Anandita, for bringing Amaya and me today in the podcast, delighted to be here.

So, you know, I think this visit was really significant in the sense that the European Commission brought almost all commissioners, 22 commissioners, in addition to the president of the European Commission.

It was an unprecedented visit. And the Commission itself wanted to highlight the fact that this was Ursula's von der Leyen's first foreign trip in her new mandate as president of the European

Commission. The European Union institutions wanted to stress that they chose India very

deliberately as this first foreign trip to demonstrate that India was going to take an increasingly

important part in the EU's foreign policy priorities and that India was kind of a unique actor in the

EU's array of partners, as we know.

It's not always been easy between the EU and India.

EU-India talks, particularly on the free trade agreements stalled for years.

And since the beginning of the war in Ukraine and Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine,

there have been really difficult

moments between the European Union and India, with the European Union trying to understand

...