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No. French is not all that popular in India. Open Sicilian, Kings Indian, Slav, Nimzo-QI, predominantly. At scholastic levels 60% of the games are either open sicilian and Kings Indian.

I once heard the joke that all the Indians played the French, and all the French played the Indians. 

In smaller countrys with perhaps only a single "star", his recommendations can perhaps become fashion. But nowadays with places like this, where we discuss openings with people halfway around the globe, and all read the same chessbooks written in english, one would suspect that any differences in popularity between different countries should disappear.

Still... doesn't the Brittish players more often than anyone else play those offbeat and dodgy 1.d4 openings?
(Colle, Torre, London, etc.)

While I've now moved to Switzerland, I still have a much better idea about what people use to play in Northern Germany than about what they play here. Around Hamburg there used to be a certain Scandinavian boom following the book by Wahls, but that has somewhat gone away again (the region still has got to have some of the best prepared white players though...). In general though my impression is that people very much follow fashion, it's really funny how recently the number of KID players has drastically decreased (the Chigorin seems a bit like a current anti-d4 fashion - well, there's Wisnewski in Kiel, maybe that's the reason), while on the other hand so many people have started to play various Sicilians with e7-e5.

It's the one thing that gives me sympathy for l33+ sp34k, that it dodges these d4mn3d auto-censors and allows you to write things like d!|{e which is a word that has meaning beyond someone's sexual orientation--you know what?  This is clearly off-topic, but let me add I hate it that you can write kitty cat but not pussy cat.

Okay, I play in San Francisco, and about half the people in my club are from former Eastern Block places, and the rest of us are the usual motley urban American crew.  So I'm in a position to see how opening choices vary between these two cultures, anyway.

Among the rest of us, 1. e4 dominates as White, though there are also lots of London/Torre/Colle/Barry kind of d4s, and some KIAs.  The Sicilian is almost universal to 1. e4, and most of these turn into anti-Sicilians of one kind or another.  There are also a few Scandinavians and a very few French--the Frenchies are always hard-core about it, though I don't know why we bother, since mainly we face Advances and Exchanges.  Against 1. d4 there are lots of Benkos and anti-Benkos, though main-line 1. d4 openings are rare enough that it's hard to get an idea of what the most common replies are. 

On the other hand, among the Russians and Moldovians and Mongolians &c., there's a much healthier looking variety.  They seem to prefer 1. d4 d5, playing Slavs and Catalans and Queen's Gambits, though of course the Nimzo related comes out, too.  Against 1. e4 they also like the Sicilians, but Open ones, and leaven that with a bunch of 1...e5.  As White 1. e4 is still the most popular, but barely, with 1. d4 and 1. c4 also easy to see.  

I'm constantly amazed by how broad their opening knowledge is.  Usually I play as black 1. d4 e6.  Western d4 players generally wouldn't touch 2. e4 with a ten-foot pole, but the Russians et. al. go into it about half the time, like they're shrugging: a French?  Why not?  And these supposed-1. d4 players reel off 15 moves of French theory without much thought.  

Then there was the little Russian guy, rating 1800-something, who scared me off the Dunst for good:

1. Nc3 ...

I hadn't seen this opening at my club and thought it would be good for a surprise, or quick tranposition into something else.  But without taking much time my opponent reeled off:

1...d5 2. e4 d4 3. Nce2 e5 4. Ng3 Nf6 

Called by Keilhack a mistake, who says Black should play 4...Be6 to keep White from his next move:

5. Bc4 ...

And white is looking good, no?  But then he played

5...h5!

And I ended up in trouble after 6. Nf3 h4 7. Nxe5 hxg3 8. Bxf7+ Ke7 9. Ng6+ Kxf7 10. Nxh8+ Kg8.  Yipes!  This is buried deep in Keilhack, and he offers no good solutions to 5...h5.

What that little old guy was doing with knowledge of main-line Dunst, I still don't know.  

Anyway, these observations offered without much reasoning to the whys of it, though it seems like the non-former-Soviet players spend a lot of their energy avoiding theory, and if they do want theory, they go in for off-beat lines.

***edit*** Okay, I totally cracked up when I posted this and saw the auto-censor had replaced my "pvssy" cat with a "girl thingy" cat.  I've never seen one of these things with a sense of humor before!

In the discussion forum even the innocent word "spo on" was censored... So, who's responsible for this site - Ned Flanders?   

The Leningrad was very popular in Sweden too, at least in some clubs. When I played for Lund a few years ago almost half the team played it, e.g: Christer Niklasson, Emanuel Berg & me, and we all played different main lines as well! But now I think E.B has migrated to the Nimzo Indian.

Actually, openings are probably more dependant on in which region and club you start playing than what country. But few tournaments give the clubs for foreign players, so it's hard to keep track of 'who plays for what club', if you're not from the same country.

A sad comment on the times we live in when you can't even write the word "d**e".  I wonder what would happen if they knew about the story of the little boy sticking his finger in the d**e?!

'Germanic-speaking countries' may not be the best definition, as English is a germanic language too, perhaps even French could be called semi-germanic as the Franks were a germanic people who replaced the romans.

From the germans and dutch  I've played I can't say that I've noticed that they prefer the french, in my experience most of them played the Sicilian.

But in Sweden, the french is definitely a very common defence not only among young players. But many of the rising 'stars' (by our standards) do play the french. One explanation could be that many of them have trained with GM Stellan Brynell who has been devoted to 1...e6 for most of his career.