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INDIA AND SWEDEN

What’s on the agenda for Sweden-India relations in 2024?

From ministerial visits to factory openings, from the start of the cricket season to classical music recitals, here's what's on the agenda for Sweden-India relations in 2024.

Published: 25 January 2024 11:05 CET
Updated: 27 January 2024 10:41 CET
What's on the agenda for Sweden-India relations in 2024?
A dance troupe performs at the Namaste Stockholm festival in 2023. Photo: Rana Pratap Photography

When Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, launched the India-Sweden Industry Transition Partnership at the COP28 climate conference in Dubai in December, it was yet another sign of the growing economic and political links between the two countries.

The roughly 65,000 Indians working and studying in Sweden are increasingly making their mark culturally, arranging festivals and events, and taking part in the social scene in Sweden’s cities. 

Indian consultancies like Wipro, TCS, HCL, Infosys and Tech Mahindra are rapidly establishing themselves, while Indian giants like Tata Steel, Aditya Birla Group and Bharat Forge have bought up historic Swedish industrial companies like Surahammars Bruk, Domsjö Fabriker, and Imatra Kilsta.

At the same time, India has become the prime investment destination and target market for Swedish companies as they seek to diversify away from China.

“When we investigate how Swedish companies see the business climate in different countries, it’s very obvious that India is a country where many Swedish companies are seeing an extremely positive outlook,” Cecilia Oskarsson, trade commissioner at Sweden’s embassy in Delhi, told The Local.

“India is where most Swedish companies anticipate that they will be, where they will make investments in the coming years.”

Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson meets his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi at the COP28 summit in Dubai. Photo: Indian Ministry of Extrernal Affairs

Here’s what’s on the agenda. 

February 

Sweden’s foreign minister, Tobias Billström, will be attending India’s biggest foreign policy conference, the Raisina Dialogue, which is held between February 21st and February 24th. 

Billström will also take part in an event discussing Sweden’s partnership with India on the green transition, which is being run by Business Sweden, Sweden’s trade promotion agency. 

March 

Håkan Jevrell, Sweden’s state secretary for foreign trade, will be visiting India for the third time in just one and a half years in March. 

Saab is set to start construction of a new factory in India, where it will produce the shoulder-launched Carl-Gustaf M4 weapon system for the Indian armed forces. Saab is the first global defence company to be approved by the Indian government for 100 percent foreign direct investment for a manufacturing facility.

Two delegations of Swedish universities to India are being planned this spring by the Swedish embassy’s Office of Science and Innovation (OSI) in New Delhi, one focusing on Life Science and the other on collaborations in the social sciences, humanities and economics. 

May 

The Indian election is expected to be held around the middle of the year, probably in May. Indian ministers are likely to delay visiting Sweden until the election is over and the new government is in place.

India currently does not offer Indian citizens who are abroad the possibility of voting at embassies, and postal voting is generally restricted to government employees and members of the armed forces stationed abroad. 

The Swedish cricket league will start its 2024 cricket series on May 30th, with India supplying many of the teams’ most dexterous batsmen and bowlers. 

June 

The UN International Day of Yoga will hold its 10th anniversary on June 21st. The Indian embassy in Stockholm will hold an open air yoga session on Riddarholmen, the islet off Stockholm’s Gamla Stan old town. Indian associations in cities across Sweden will hold their own events, as will many of Sweden’s yoga centres. 

For the fourth year running, India will host a series of talks titled Engaging India at Almedalen at the Almedalen political festival between June 25th and 28th. In 2023, the talks were held at the Visby town library. 

September 

The Namaste Stockholm event run by India Unlimited takes over Kungsträdgården in central Stockholm at the start of September, with music and dance performances put on primarily by Indians living and working in Sweden, a food court serving food from across India and more besides. 

India Unlimited also runs the India Sweden Innovation Day, which will take place in Stockholm “in the autumn”, with dates yet to be set. 

October 

The Durga Puja festival is celebrated with events in all of Sweden’s major cities, with at least two events in Stockholm, and celebrations in Helsingborg, Gothenburg, Uppsala and even as far north as Luleå.  

The Stockholm Sangeet Festival, Sweden’s leading Indian classical music event, typically takes place at the start of October, with performances at theatres and other venues in central Stockholm. In 2023, top Indian classical performers, such as Hassan Haider Khan, Vidushi Mita Nag and Subhen Chatterjee, took part. 

The India Sweden Baltic Business Conclave, hosted by the Confederation of Indian Industry, will be held in New Delhi in the last three months of the year. 

The Diwali festival falls this year on October 31st, with events held by Indian associations and temples in all of Sweden’s major cities. 

Events which will happen at some point 

Negotiations are ongoing on the EU-India free trade agreement. When talks resumed in 2022, the aim was for a deal to be reached before the Indian and EU elections in June 2024. Sweden, with its open, export-oriented economy is seen by India as one of the European countries most in favour of a far-reaching, ambitious deal. 

A Swedish space delegation is likely to visit the offices of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in Bangalore, following the visit of an Indian delegation to the Swedish space industry around Kiruna in 2023. 

The visit would allow companies that are part of Sweden’s thriving space start-up scene to sell their services to India’s space industry, which recently opened up to the private sector.

A third Indo-Nordic Summit between India’s prime minister and the prime ministers of the five Nordic countries may be held again, following the second summit in Copenhagen in May 2022, but is unlikely to take place until well into the second half of the year.     

Business Sweden hopes to arrange a delegation of Indian mining companies, such as NMDC, Tata Steel, Vedanta Resources and Hindustan Zinc to Sweden, where they will meet Swedish suppliers of equipment and technology, such as Epiroc, Sandvik, and Volvo Construction Equipment, and visit mines around Kiruna in Lapland.

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INSIDE SWEDEN

Inside Sweden: Why troll factory won’t spark a government crisis

The Local's editor Emma Löfgren rounds up the biggest stories of the week in our Inside Sweden newsletter.

Published: 18 May 2024 09:22 CEST
Inside Sweden: Why troll factory won't spark a government crisis

Hej,

News that the Sweden Democrats are operating a far-right troll factory – which among other things the party uses to smear political opponents as well as its supposed allies – has caused probably the biggest rift yet between them and the three other parties that make up Sweden’s ruling coalition.

The leaders of the Moderates, Christian Democrats and Liberals all strongly criticised the Sweden Democrats’ blatant violation of the so-called “respect clause” in their Tidö collaboration agreement – the clause that states that the four parties should speak respectfully of each other in the media.

But after crisis talks held on Thursday, the conflict appears to be dying down.

The Sweden Democrats hit out strongly at the TV4 Kalla Fakta documentary where the troll factory was revealed, calling it a smear campaign and disinformation, but simultaneously went as far as to confirm that they do run anonymous social media accounts for which they refused to apologise.

They did say sorry to the Tidö parties for including them in the smear campaigns, and promised to remove some of the posts that had offended the other three parties, plus reassign a couple of members of staff to other duties until they’ve been given training on the Tidö “respect clause”.

But that doesn’t remove the fact that they vowed to continue the anonymous social media accounts whose existence they had prior to the documentary consistently denied, or the fact that some of the social media posts shared not only vague anti-immigration content, but white power propaganda.

The Liberals took the row the furthest, with Liberal leader Johan Pehrson describing people in his party as skitförbannade – pissed off as hell. He said ahead of the crisis meeting that they would demand that the Sweden Democrats cease all anonymous posting, which the latter rejected.

The party had two choices: walk out of the government collaboration and possibly spark a snap election, or walk back its strong words ahead of the meeting and wait for it to blow over.

They chose a kind of middle way, and called for an inquiry to be launched into banning political parties from operating anonymous social media accounts. The Social Democrats immediately accused the Liberals of trying to “bury the issue in an inquiry” – a classic Swedish political method of indecisive conflict avoidance which the Social Democrats themselves are well familiar with.

The Christian Democrats and Moderates both said that the Sweden Democrats had accepted their criticism and welcomed the party’s reshuffling of staff within its communications department, adding that it still had to prove its commitment to the Tidö agreement going forward.

So why isn’t this causing a bigger government crisis?

We asked Evelyn Jones, a politics reporter for the Dagens Nyheter daily, to come on the Sweden in Focus podcast to explain it to us:

“The Sweden Democrats are the biggest party in this coalition, even though they’re not part of the government. So the government really needs them. It’s hard for them to just stop cooperating with the Sweden Democrats,” she said.

“The cooperation between the government parties and the Sweden Democrats has been going pretty smoothly since the last election – more smoothly than a lot of people thought. This is probably the biggest crisis so far, but how big it is, is hard to say.”

You can listen to the full interview with her and the rest of the Sweden in Focus podcast here. 

In other news

If you are a descendant of a Sweden-born person and would like to find out more about them, there are ways to do that. I wrote this week about how to research your Swedish ancestry.

That guide was prompted by my interview with the chair of a community history group in a small parish in north-central Sweden, which has tried to get to the bottom of rumours that US mega star Taylor Swift’s ancestors hail from their village. I had so much fun writing this article.

The EU elections will be held on June 9th, but advance voting begins next week in Sweden. And poll cards are already being sent out, so if you’re eligible to vote you should receive yours soon.

Sweden’s consumer price index fell to 3.9 percent in April, below 4.0 percent for the first time in two years, reinforcing predictions that the central bank will keep lowering interest rates.

Sweden’s four-party government bloc has broken with the other parties in a parliamentary committee on public service broadcasting, adding what the opposition complains are “radically changed” proposals. How shocking are they?

Many people move to Sweden because of their partner’s career. Perhaps you’re one of these so-called “trailing spouses”. I’ve been asking readers in this situation how they’re settling in, and will have an article for you next week. There’s still time to answer our survey to share your experience.

Thanks for reading.

Have a good weekend,

Emma

Inside Sweden is our weekly newsletter for members which gives you news, analysis and, sometimes, takes you behind the scenes at The Local. It’s published each Saturday and with Membership+ you can also receive it directly to your inbox.

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