India, Feb. 5 -- At a time when diplomacy is increasingly performed in public, compressed into soundbites, hashtags and instant reactions, the India-EU Free Trade Agreement feels almost countercultural. After more than a decade of stalled negotiations and repeated false starts, one of the world's most consequential trade deals did not come together through urgency, pressure or dramatic breakthroughs. It came together quietly. That quiet matters. The India-EU FTA covers economies that together account for nearly a quarter of global GDP and close to 30 per cent of global trade. Its scale alone makes it historic. But what is more instructive than the numbers is how the deal was arrived at, and how it was communicated. This was not a negotiat...