India, Nov. 15 -- Why the Netherlands now matters to India.

Ask an Indian diplomat of the 1990s to name the European capitals that mattered and you'd have heard London, Paris, Berlin, perhaps Moscow. The Hague would hardly have come up. The Netherlands was pleasant, rich, efficient, and peripheral to India. It was a place for tulips, cheese and the occasional trade delegation. That isn't true anymore, and the change has come faster than most of us noticed.

The turning point, at least on paper, was May this year. Narendra Modi spent three days in the Netherlands, from 15 to 17 May, met Prime Minister Rob Jetten, called on King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima, and left having raised the relationship to a Strategic Partnership with a fiv...