Whatever else transpires during French President Jacques Chirac’s state visit to India, the events preceding the voyage have been nothing short of a tragic-comic policy nightmare.

The French delegation, which includes five ministers and some 30 top French business leaders, makes an initial two-day stop in Thailand where they were expected to sign a number of cooperation agreements and pave the way for a number of transactions, before trying to make the most out of the compromised Indian leg of the trip.

The three developments casting uncertainty over the Indian segment, which initially may have seemed to have no connection, may have become embroiled in an embarrassing imbroglio for France and other European countries and to some degree for India and other emerging Asian partners. In France opposition political figures, non-governmental organisations and editorialists were casting the mishaps as a “fiasco,” “shame, or at least an embarrassment.

They also touch on deeper elements of the relations between Europe, Asia and other great powers.

First of all, the initial calculations behind the visit by the French President may have found inspiration in the hopes of both countries involved to maintain high profile political and economic relations in addition to their other well-publicised contacts with other powers, such as China and the US. This planning could have some influence on the perception that India, for example, while seeking good neighbourly relations with China, was in fact being drawn into a global and regional rivalry more toward the US camp and influence. On the French side, it also seemed not only to seek to counter or offer an alternative to Washington’s power and influence in New Delhi and also demonstrate to India that French interests were also not completely obsessed by the Chinese dragon.

But a pair of major unfortunately planned or unplanned incidents erupted just a few days before the presidential departure that cast the entire exercise in a different light.

It turned out that the nearly 50-year French aircraft carrier Clemenceau was on its way to its final resting place as scrap metal in the Alang shipbreaking yard in India after service in both the Balkan, Gulf and Iraq conflicts. The operation, however, provoked a major outcry from Greenpeace and other environmentalists in both France in India focusing of the fact that the ship was contaminated with asbestos and that conditions at the Indian shipbreaker would put the workforce at risk. Another major element of the protests was that the transfer of this poisonous material amounted to an infraction of the international Basel convention forbidding toxic waste shipments from industrialised to developing countries.

The Indian magazine Frontline commented “To allow the ship loaded with toxic wastes to be dismantled at Alang in Gujarat, where she is headed, will open the floodgates to further imports of poisonous junk from the West, including discarded warships - with horrifying consequences for our workers' health and the environment.” The well-informed fortnightly also noted a previous incident involving a Danish ship, the Clemenceau’s nationalistic namesake and French duplicity in at first seeking to exempt the ship from the Basel Convention as “war materiel” after trying to ban Canadian asbestos exports banned in the WTO.

The magazine minced no words about its own compatriots, declaring “Even more condemnable is the Indian government's stance which encourages hazardous waste imports on largely specious and mutually contradictory grounds: a) that they are not "really" harmful; b) that India has an "adequate capacity" to handle them in an "environmentally sound" manner; c) that the waste-processing business generates income and employment. India has been voluntarily importing all manner of toxic wastes…”

At other levels, both Indian and French enterprises and workers complained about the possibility of being denied much-needed work--dangerous or not. At one point, the international incident also involved hesitant operators of the Suez Canal suspicious that the ship could pose a risk in their waterway. A subplot was an inquiry into whether a French firm had already removed sufficient asbestos from the Clemenceau to comply with the restrictions of the Basel Convention as contracted. French Defence Minister Michéle Alliot-Marie, a rising star in the French presidential election race, was being pilloried for the apparent blunder.

The furore mounted on both sides until both judiciaries ruled provisionally that the ship should not sail into Indian waters and President Chirac ended this phase of the controversy by ordering the crew to steer a new course back towards its home port. Accompanying it were reflections on whether there should not be a central and useful European decontaminating capability for handling such a widespread asbestos or other toxic waste problems rather than giving the impression that industrialised Europe was simply dumping such dangerous material and chores to the developing world as often charged.

Otherwise the Clemenceau and others could simply linger and rust in some of the existing European junkyards with no place else to go, another irony since countries such as India, China and others are frequently rumoured to be seeking cut-rate aircraft carriers, even towing Soviet-era wrecks into their waters. And France, for that matter, is frequently portrayed as desperately seeking to flog defence exports to virtually any appropriate buyer.

It would have been bad enough if Chirac, who has had an inordinate run of political misfortune in the past year, had only the Clemenceau’s last voyage to contend with, but he also had the Mittal-Arcelor feud to add misery to Franco-Indian relations.

In this other dilemma, the planet’s biggest and most powerful steelmaker, Indian-born but now London-based Lakshmi Mittal and his Dutch-headquartered Mittal Steel were in the throes of grappling for control of Europe’s largest steel producer Arcelor, no stranger to corporate takeover bids and ambiguous national identity of its own.

Already sensitive French political, business and public opinion, which had defended its own Danone “strategic yoghurt” tooth and nail from only a rumoured raid by Pepsi a few months earlier, instinctively drew up the national drawbridge to protect Arcelor, actually based in Luxembourg with sprawling operations there and in France, Belgium, Spain and elsewhere.

While some Europeans were waiting to see the scope of the Mittal offer and assure jobs and other national economic interests were protected, much of the French elite turned the episode into a quasi-nationalistic crusade. Perhaps overreacting to the shrill political and press warnings of an “Indian” takeover, Indian Trade Minister Kamal Nath and sources close to Mittal also raised the tone by alluding to racist behaviour and hinting the dispute could spread and other relations could be affected.

French Economics Minister Thierry Breton sought to tone down his own previous hardline image as the dispute escalated and the visit to India neared by telling an interviewer that “Mittal isn’t an Indian company and it doesn’t even have any operations in India.