The Two Registers of India’s Africa Policy

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India’s engagement with Africa is conducted in two voices that do not always say the same thing. The continental voice speaks of fifty-four partners, a summit mechanism and a shared position in world politics. The bilateral voice does the actual work — in Pretoria, Abuja, Cairo, Nairobi, Addis Ababa and Port Louis, where relationships are unequal in depth, uneven in content and largely unaffected by whether a continental summit convenes.

Three things run underneath both registers and are the subject of this account
- The comparison with China, which is the frame in which every other external partner’s Africa policy is now read, and the question of what India can offer that scale cannot buy
- The maritime and defence track, which is the one domain where India’s advantage over China is material rather than reputational
- The multilateral and bilateral records — what India’s diplomacy actually converts African goodwill into, and what the named relationships look like when examined one by one
The lineage, the four phases of the policy and the Ten Principles of Kampala belong to the companion account of how India’s Africa policy evolved, and the instruments — concessional credit, technical cooperation, grant projects, tariff preference — to the companion account of the development partnership. Both are cited here, not rebuilt

The Asymmetry, Stated Before Anything Else

Any comparison between India and China in Africa that does not begin by conceding the gap is not analysis but consolation. The gap is large, it is widening on some measures, and no plausible Indian policy closes it.

Scale, in the numbers that matter

Trade. China–Africa trade reached a record US$348.05 billion in 2025 — Chinese exports of US$225.03 billion against imports of US$123.02 billion, leaving Africa a deficit above US$102 billion. India–Africa trade in FY 2025-26 was US$93.69 billion, so China’s is roughly three and a half to four times India’s
Official finance. Chinese lenders committed US$180.87 billion across 1,319 loans to 49 African governments and seven regional institutions between 2000 and 2024. India’s African credit exposure — 196 lines of credit worth about US$12 billion to 42 countries — is roughly a fifteenth of that
Construction. Chinese firms earned about US$40 billion in gross engineering and construction revenues in Africa in 2024 alone. India has no comparable contracting presence anywhere on the continent
Presence. China maintains its only overseas military base at Djibouti; India has none, and its access arrangements are hosted facilities and port calls
The one number that runs the other way: Chinese new lending has collapsed from its mid-2010s peak to just under US$2.1 billion across six projects in 2024, concentrated in Angola, Kenya, Egypt, the DRC and Senegal. The Chinese model has itself retrenched, moving from sovereign infrastructure lending toward equity, trade finance and small-enterprise on-lending

The mechanism gap, which is worse than the money gap

The Forum on China–Africa Cooperation was founded in 2000, meets on a three-year cycle and has never missed one. The ninth forum, Beijing, September 2024, drew 51 African heads of state — more than attend the UN General Assembly — and pledged about US$50.9 billion over three years, split roughly into US$30 billion of credit lines, US$10 billion of development assistance and US$10 billion of Chinese corporate investment, and denominated in renminbi for the first time
India has held three India–Africa Forum Summits — 2008, 2011 and 2015 — and none since. The fourth was convened for New Delhi in May 2026 and postponed jointly with the African Union on 21 May 2026 over the Ebola outbreak centred on the Democratic Republic of the Congo and concurrent mpox transmission. No new dates have been set. It was the third postponement
The comparison is not about money. A summit costs a fraction of a single pledge; what China has and India has not is a calendar African governments can plan against — ministerial follow-up, an action plan with a review cycle, and the certainty that the next meeting will happen
The consequence is reputational. India’s continental architecture is the part of its Africa policy that most visibly does not work, and the part that would be cheapest to repair

India is not losing the comparison with China on money. It is losing it on regularity, which costs nothing.

Two Models, Anatomised

The serious difference between India and China in Africa is not size but kind. China builds assets. India transfers systems. Every other contrast follows from that one.

Finance

China lends against projects, and in the resource-rich cases against future commodity flows. Concessional loans from the Export-Import Bank of China sit alongside commercial lending from the China Development Bank and the state commercial banks; several early transactions in Angola and the DRC were resource-backed, repaid in oil or minerals rather than cash
India lends against a government guarantee and an Indian-content condition. The credit is routed through the Export-Import Bank of India, appraised by the Ministry of External Affairs, priced by the Department of Economic Affairs, and carries a minimum Indian-content requirement — a subsidy to Indian exporters as much as a transfer to the borrower
The scale difference is compounded by a disbursement difference. Indian announcements outrun Indian disbursement by a wide margin; Chinese commitments have historically converted faster. India’s credibility problem is delivery; China’s is terms
India has one real distinction in its lending record: it has lent to heavily indebted poor countries and least developed countries that no commercial lender and few bilateral ones would touch on any terms. That is a genuine solidarity claim and it is verifiable

Delivery and labour

The Chinese model imports its own execution. Chinese state-owned enterprises win the contract, Chinese engineering firms build, and a substantial share of the skilled and supervisory workforce is Chinese. The asset is delivered fast and to specification; the local economy captures the construction wage bill only partially
The recurring African complaints are consistent — limited local employment and subcontracting, weak technology transfer, poor labour conditions on some sites, and the absence of a maintenance capability once the contractor leaves
The Indian model has no construction arm at all. What India delivers is training slots, deputed experts, institution-building projects and private commercial investment that hires locally because it has no alternative
Indian firms in Africa are employers, not contractors. More than two hundred Indian companies in Nigeria alone employ on the order of a hundred thousand Nigerians; Indian investment in Ethiopia exceeds US$5 billion and is credited with over 75,000 jobs. The presence is commercial, dispersed and permanent in a way a contracting workforce is not

Sectors, presence and political form

	China	India
Instrument	State-directed concessional and commercial lending; contractor-delivered projects	Government-guaranteed export credit; training, scholarships and grant projects
What is transferred	A built asset — port, railway, dam, stadium, government building	A system or a skill — trained officials, digital public infrastructure, an institution, a medicine supply
Who executes	Chinese state-owned enterprises with imported managerial and skilled labour	Indian private firms hiring locally; Indian institutions training African personnel
Sectors	Infrastructure, mining, ports, power, telecommunications	Pharmaceuticals, information technology, digital payments and identity, agriculture, health, education, automobiles
Debt profile	Large sovereign exposure; several distressed borrowers; resource-backed structures in some cases	Small exposure; concessional terms; not a political issue in any African state
Human presence	A rotating contractor workforce, negligible settled community	A settled diaspora of about three million across 46 countries, citizens of African states
Political framing	Non-interference; strong party-to-party and state-to-state ties	Non-conditionality plus democratic affinity and a shared colonial experience
Distinctive asset	Speed, scale and the ability to finance what nobody else will	Affordable medicines, trained people and replicable public digital goods
Structural weakness	Debt sustainability, opacity, local employment, maintenance	Delivery lag, small footprint, thin project execution capacity

The two models are not substitutes and African governments do not treat them as such. A state that needs a rail link cannot buy it from India; a state that needs ten thousand civil servants trained cannot buy that from China. The competition is for political standing, not for the same contracts

The Debt Question, Taken Seriously

The debt-trap thesis is the single most influential proposition about China in Africa, and it is the one an Indian argument is most tempted to borrow uncritically. It should be stated at its strongest and then tested against what the research actually shows.

The thesis at its strongest

The claim: China extends loans on terms borrowers cannot sustain, secures them against strategic assets and converts default into control — ports, mines, telecommunications backbones and, ultimately, political alignment
The supporting facts are real. Chinese lending is large in aggregate and concentrated in a handful of borrowers; several loan contracts carry confidentiality clauses, cross-default provisions and escrow arrangements unusual in official lending; Zambia’s 2020 default was the pandemic era’s first African sovereign default and Chinese lenders were its largest bilateral creditors; and Chinese participation in multilateral restructuring has been grudging
The strategic reading adds that Chinese finance and Chinese naval presence have moved together across the Indian Ocean rim, with Djibouti as the demonstration case

What the evidence does not support

Deborah Brautigam and the China Africa Research Initiative have examined the loan data country by country and find no case in which China seized a strategic asset in settlement of a debt. Her position is that “debt-trap diplomacy” is a narrative that spread far faster than the evidence for it, and that Chinese lenders have more often rescheduled, refinanced or written off than foreclosed
Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri make the structural argument: China’s development-financing system is too fragmented and too poorly coordinated to execute a coherent strategic plan. Lending decisions are made by competing policy banks, commercial banks, provincial governments and state-owned enterprises pursuing revenue, not by a central authority allocating leverage
Their second claim is about agency. Recipient governments initiate most of these projects, for domestic political reasons of their own, and ruling elites use megaprojects for patronage. What results is “a fragmented, messy and poorly governed set of development projects”, not a designed trap
Hambantota, the standard illustration, is routinely misdescribed. The 2017 transaction was a 99-year lease of a 70 per cent stake to China Merchants Port Holdings for a payment of US$1.12 billion, with Sri Lanka keeping 30 per cent. It was not a debt-equity swap: no debt was cancelled, Sri Lanka remained liable to the Export-Import Bank of China, and the money went to strengthen foreign reserves and service short-term external debt owed largely to Western creditors

Why the absence of a strategy does not make the exposure benign

A trap requires intent; a debt problem does not. Whether or not Beijing planned it, several African states carry Chinese-origin obligations large enough to constrain their fiscal choices, and the opacity of the contracts makes collective restructuring harder for every creditor
Leverage accrues without being sought. A creditor holding a material share of a state’s external debt has influence over its votes, contracts and diplomatic positions whether or not it set out to acquire it
The reputational effect is what India benefits from. African concern about sustainability, terms, employment and technology transfer is real, is voiced by African governments and publics, and has opened space for partners offering something else
The correct Indian position is therefore narrow and defensible: decline the conspiracy, keep the critique. India’s advantage is not that China is predatory but that India’s offer creates capability rather than obligation

The strongest argument against the Chinese model in Africa is not that it is a trap. It is that it leaves nothing behind that the recipient can run without help.

Where India’s Comparative Advantage Actually Lies

A long-term comparative advantage over China cannot be a list of Indian strengths. It has to be an argument about which variables scale and which do not, because India’s advantages all lie in domains where money is not the binding constraint — and each carries a limit that has to be stated with it.

The diaspora — the asset that cannot be bought

About three million people of Indian origin live across 46 African countries, concentrated in South Africa (roughly 1.3 million) and Mauritius (about 0.8 million, some 70 per cent of the population), with substantial communities in Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Uganda, Mozambique and Réunion
They are citizens, not expatriates — the product of nineteenth-century indentured and commercial migration, three to five generations old, holding positions in African business, medicine, law, education and politics
The comparison is stark. China’s presence in Africa is a contractor workforce on rotation; there is no settled Chinese diaspora of comparable standing anywhere on the continent. India has constituencies inside African societies; China has personnel inside African projects
The first limit: goodwill is not leverage. Indian-origin Africans vote as Africans and lobby for African interests, and in parts of East Africa the community’s colonial-era intermediary role is remembered — expulsion is within living memory
The second limit is domestic and self-inflicted. Recurrent racist attacks on African students in India are reported across African media and destroy goodwill faster than any programme creates it, and India’s institutional record on redress is thin

Training, and the alumni network it created

Capacity building is India’s oldest and best-evidenced instrument. Technical and economic cooperation has run since 1964 and, in the two decades to the mid-2020s, over 37,000 African government officials received training in India; more than 25,000 African students are enrolled in Indian institutions at any time
The compounding effect is the point. Alumni sit in African finance ministries, central banks, defence establishments and judiciaries, carrying a familiarity with Indian institutions, standards and suppliers no advertising budget could buy
The military dimension is older than the civilian one. India helped establish the military academy at Harar in Ethiopia, functional from April 1958, and the Nigerian Defence Academy from 1960, and African officers have trained at the Indian Military Academy, the Defence Services Staff College and the National Defence College ever since
The limit: the network is diffuse and India has never systematically mapped or cultivated it. There is no Indian equivalent of a structured alumni association converting thirty-seven thousand trained officials into a standing constituency

Democratic affinity and the shared colonial experience

India and most African states share a formative experience — colonial subjection, an anti-colonial movement, a contested transfer of power, and the attempt to run a plural, poor democracy afterwards
That makes India’s development record legible in a way China’s is not. African policymakers can ask how India ran elections across enormous diversity, how it managed linguistic federalism, how it built a public distribution system, how it regulated generic medicines
Shashi Tharoor’s formulation captures the asymmetry precisely: African countries admire China, but they want to be like India — the aspiration is toward a plural, argumentative, self-lifting democracy, not toward a developmental autocracy
The limit is that admiration does not allocate contracts. African governments under fiscal pressure select on price, speed and financing, and the affinity argument has no purchase in a tender

Pharmaceuticals — the advantage that is already realised

India is inside African health systems in a way no other external partner is. Indian generics supply a very large share of African medicine consumption — roughly 40 per cent of Nigeria’s pharmaceutical imports and over 90 per cent in some therapeutic categories — and Indian manufacturers are central to international vaccine procurement
The historical claim is strong. Indian generic antiretrovirals collapsed the cost of HIV treatment in Africa in the 2000s, and much of the tuberculosis and malaria burden has been carried on Indian supply; investment has since followed, with around US$4 billion put into pharmaceutical manufacturing in Nigeria alone
The limit is erosion. African states are building their own manufacturing under the continental health agenda, Chinese suppliers compete on price, and India’s own export restrictions during the acute phase of the pandemic were noticed and remembered

Digital public infrastructure — the offer China does not make in the same form

India’s digital identity, payments and data-exchange stack is a transferable system, not a purchased asset. It costs the recipient almost nothing, creates no debt, and leaves the state owning a capability it can operate and modify
The uptake is real. India has signed digital public infrastructure agreements with more than twenty countries; six African states — Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, The Gambia and Lesotho — took up the India Stack offer in February 2026, and Namibia agreed in July 2025 to build a payments system on the Indian model
This is the cleanest statement of the whole comparative-advantage argument. A port creates a debt and a dependency; a payments rail creates a capability and a norm
The limit is absorptive. The offer is only as good as African connectivity, data protection and administrative reach — and the Pan-African e-Network, India’s largest grant project on the continent, was handed to the African Union in 2017 after difficulties with utilisation

The private sector as the vehicle, and the absence of an extractive record

India’s presence in Africa is overwhelmingly commercial and privately held — Tata, Bharti Airtel, Mahindra, Larsen and Toubro, Sun Pharma, Varun Beverages, Godrej and a long tail of trading houses. It is not directed from New Delhi, does not withdraw when policy attention moves, and therefore compounds where a state-directed presence rises and falls with a summit cycle
India carries no colonial or extractive record in Africa. It was never a coloniser, has no history of resource concessions extracted under duress, and its anti-colonial and anti-apartheid record is the reason it was welcomed
The limits are the mirror image. The Indian state cannot direct its firms to strategic sectors, cannot underwrite risk at Chinese scale, and barely coordinates its development programme with its business presence

The advantages audited

The synthesis is uncomfortable and correct. Every Indian advantage is a stock — reputation, community, alumni, credibility — and every Chinese advantage is a flow of money, contracts and delivered assets. Stocks depreciate when they are not spent, and India has been living off its stock for two decades

The Scholars on the Comparison

Sreeram Chaulia rejects the equivalence outright: India cannot be classed with China as a mineral-grabber out to plunder the continent and denude it of its natural wealth
- His substantive charge against the Chinese model is that it lacks a human-resource component, a transparency element and a social-sector or democratic dimension
- Because it brings its own companies and its own labour it generates little local employment, and it is financed at costs he regards as unsustainable over time — which is why India has an indispensable place on the continent
Shyam Saran makes the strategic version, and it is the single most useful sentence in the Indian debate: India should not play a game of catch-up with China, because it will lose it
- India should instead leverage what is its own — capacity building, entrepreneurship, small and medium enterprise development and digital connectivity — at a moment when China is increasingly perceived in Africa as selfish and extractive
Shashi Tharoor reduces the comparison to a proposition about aspiration rather than about capacity: African countries admire China, but they want to be like India
C. Raja Mohan frames Africa as contested strategic space and is the least comfortable of the group
- His assessment of the Modi decade is that the Prime Minister has succeeded in putting Africa on India’s mental map, but that matching the scale of Chinese engagement demands far more proactive effort — and that China is not the only competitor
- His geographic corrective is that Indian strategy has over-invested in Southeast Asia and neglected Africa, and that the priority should be the island states and the Mozambique Channel — Mozambique, Madagascar and the Comoros
Rani D. Mullen supplies the corrective from the other direction: behind the media attention and the official rhetoric, it is not easy to divert African states from China’s orbit, India’s strategy is clearer than its instruments are effective, and India has yet to convince Africa that it delivers as well as it commits
Mahesh Sachdev adds the resource realism: India is itself a developing country with constraints, should not be treated as a cash cow, should attach conditionalities to its assistance, and needs a tighter connection between development aid and commercial engagement

The dissent worth taking seriously

Framing Africa policy around China is itself the error. It makes Indian policy reactive, invites comparison on the one metric India will always lose, and patronises African states by treating them as objects of a contest
African states are hedging deliberately. The number of external partners running Africa summits — the European Union, the United States, Japan, Turkey, Russia, the Gulf states, Korea and India — has grown precisely because they want more partners, not a choice between two
The preference is for triangulation: playing partners against one another for better terms, more transparency, more local content and more processing. A partner who arrives asking Africa to choose has misread the room
The implication for India is liberating. If the object is not to displace China but to be indispensable in a plural field, India’s small scale stops being a disqualification

Not a Two-Horse Race: The Other Partners

The European Union is still Africa’s largest trading partner and export market, ahead of China, India and the United States, with EU–Africa goods trade of about €355 billion in 2024 and an investment stock above €250 billion
The Gulf states are the fastest-moving new entrants. The United Arab Emirates became the largest source of new greenfield investment projects in Africa in 2024, with Dubai-based port operators holding terminals along the Red Sea and Indian Ocean littoral; Saudi Arabia and Qatar have moved into energy, aviation and peace mediation
Turkey has expanded from twelve African embassies to more than forty, with trade rising from about US$5.4 billion in 2003 to over US$40 billion in 2022, an airline serving more than sixty African destinations, and armed drones as its signature export
Russia’s presence is narrow, military and disruptive. The Wagner Group’s African operations have been folded into the state-controlled Africa Corps, concentrated in Mali, the Central African Republic, Burkina Faso, Niger, Libya and Sudan, trading regime security for mining concessions
Japan has the longest-running Asian mechanism in Africa, the Tokyo International Conference on African Development, from 1993, and markets itself on “quality infrastructure” against what it calls substandard Chinese construction. Its other motive is shared with India: African votes on Security Council reform, which China has no interest in conceding

The Asia–Africa Growth Corridor: India’s answer, built with Japan

The AAGC was announced at the African Development Bank‘s annual meeting in Gandhinagar in May 2017, growing out of the India–Japan joint statement of November 2016 and the “freedom corridor” idea Shinzo Abe had raised the previous year
The division of labour is the design. India brings skills, capacity building and African familiarity; Japan brings capital and quality infrastructure. The corridor is framed around the Indian Ocean rather than around a landmass
Its four pillars
- Development and cooperation projects
- Quality infrastructure and digital and institutional connectivity
- Enhancing capabilities and skills
- People-to-people partnerships
Three features distinguish it from the Belt and Road, and they are the argument for it
- It is bilateral rather than unilateral — two proponents, not one
- It is consultative, with African states inside project decisions rather than receiving them
- It is meant to draw private, government and international finance, including from the African Development Bank, rather than one national system
The problem is that it has never been funded. No financing vehicle was created, no African Development Bank facility materialised at scale, and the corridor has produced a vision document rather than a project pipeline — the clearest illustration of India’s characteristic failure, a well-designed alternative announced and not resourced
It was never going to rival the Belt and Road in ambition or coverage. Its honest purpose is to make Indian and Japanese engagement in Africa mutually reinforcing, not to displace anything

The Ocean Is Where the Comparison Changes

Everything above concedes that India cannot match Chinese scale. The maritime domain is the exception, and it is the exception for structural reasons rather than because India has tried harder. Geography, naval capability, hydrographic capacity and a half-century of training relationships give India something China is buying rather than possessing.

The African maritime deficit

Thirty-eight of Africa’s fifty-four states are coastal or island states, and around 90 per cent of the continent’s trade moves by sea
Most of them cannot police their own exclusive economic zones. Navies and coast guards are small, hulls few, surveillance thin, and hydrographic charting incomplete
The consequence is systematic resource theft. Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing costs West Africa alone an estimated US$2.3 billion a year, alongside oil bunkering, smuggling and trafficking
African states diagnosed the problem as “sea blindness” — a habit of treating the maritime domain as peripheral — and corrected it in the African Union’s 2050 Africa Integrated Maritime Strategy, the natural counterpart to India’s own maritime strategy

The threat map

The Gulf of Aden and the Somali basin. Piracy off the Horn collapsed after 2012 under international escorting but has resurfaced since 2023; Indian warships recaptured the MV Ruen in March 2024, rescuing seventeen crew and detaining thirty-five pirates
The Gulf of Guinea and the Niger Delta, where the pattern is kidnap-for-ransom and cargo theft driven by onshore criminality rather than hijacking for a ship’s ransom
The Mozambique Channel, the theatre Indian strategists regard as most neglected, and the Red Sea and Bab-el-Mandeb, where attacks on shipping from 2023 pushed traffic around the Cape

India’s Four Avenues of Maritime Cooperation

Training. African naval officers, coast guard personnel and civilian maritime administrators are trained at Indian institutions — the largest single stream of capacity transfer India makes to the continent
Hydrography. Indian survey ships have charted African and island-state waters for decades. The strategic yield is concrete: Indian hydrographic support helped Mauritius and Seychelles secure an additional 396,000 square kilometres of continental shelf in a joint submission
Anti-piracy patrolling. The Indian Navy has maintained a continuous presence in the Gulf of Aden since 2008, escorting merchant traffic and conducting independent counter-piracy operations
Port visits and coastal-surveillance infrastructure. Regular deployments, hardware transfers, coastal radar chains, automatic identification systems and white-shipping information agreements, feeding into the Information Fusion Centre – Indian Ocean Region at Gurugram, launched in December 2018

The doctrinal frame: from SAGAR to MAHASAGAR

SAGAR — Security and Growth for All in the Region — was announced in Mauritius in 2015 and set out five commitments: safeguarding India’s own maritime interests; deepening security cooperation with littoral states; collective action against common threats; sustainable regional development; and engagement with extra-regional powers on the basis of shared interests
MAHASAGAR — Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions — was announced by Modi in Mauritius in March 2025 as SAGAR’s successor, and the change of scope is the point: from the Indian Ocean rim to the wider Global South, with Africa explicitly inside the frame rather than at its edge
The institutional vehicles are older than the slogans. The Indian Ocean Rim Association, established in 1997, includes Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, Somalia, South Africa, Tanzania and the Comoros; the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium, launched in 2008, has six African member navies with Madagascar as an observer
India assumed the chairmanship of the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium on 20 February 2026, taking over from Thailand, with an announced programme of a maritime exercise, continued IOS Sagar deployments, information-sharing workshops and three working groups on maritime security, disaster relief and interoperability

The Island and Littoral Partnerships

Mauritius — the closest relationship India has anywhere in Africa

The Indian Navy has patrolled the Mauritian exclusive economic zone since 2003, and an Indian officer has headed the Mauritian National Coast Guard on deputation
India gifted an offshore patrol vessel in 2015, has supplied fast interceptor boats, aircraft and helicopters, and installed an Automatic Identification System and a coastal surveillance radar chain
The Agalega islands facility — an airstrip and jetty built with Indian assistance and inaugurated in 2024 — is the most substantial Indian infrastructure in the western Indian Ocean, described by both governments in development rather than basing terms
Modi was chief guest at Mauritius’s national day on 11–12 March 2025, received its highest honour, announced MAHASAGAR there, and signed eight agreements including a local-currency settlement arrangement between the two central banks, white-shipping information sharing, financial-crime cooperation and blue-economy cooperation. The relationship was raised to an enhanced strategic partnership

Seychelles — and the failure worth stating

Seychelles sits astride the shipping lanes of the western Indian Ocean and has been a priority partner since the 1980s
India handed over a Dornier Do-228 maritime patrol aircraft and a US$100 million line of credit in June 2018 during President Danny Faure’s visit, and has supplied successive patrol vessels and a coastal surveillance radar project
The Assumption Island project failed, and it should be recorded as a failure. Agreed in 2015 for a joint coast guard facility, it drew objections on environmental grounds — proximity to the Aldabra World Heritage site — and on sovereignty grounds, was never ratified by the Seychelles National Assembly, and was abandoned by 2020

“Our sovereignty is sacred, there will never under my watch be a foreign military base in the Seychelles.”
— Wavel Ramkalawan, President of Seychelles

The lesson India took from it was correct. Engagement since has emphasised high-impact community development projects, hydrography and civilian infrastructure rather than basing — and India competes there with China, France, Russia and the UAE, none of which has an easier path

Djibouti, and the littoral states

Djibouti commands the entrance to the Red Sea and hosts foreign military facilities from the United States, France, Japan, Italy and — since 2017 — China’s only overseas military base
Indian warships transiting to and from the Mediterranean use Djiboutian port facilities, and the country was the staging point for Operation Raahat in April 2015, in which Indian ships and aircraft evacuated around 3,000 people from Yemen, including nationals of more than forty other countries
Kenya adopted the BAHARI joint maritime vision statement during President William Ruto’s visit in December 2023, alongside a defence cooperation framework; Tanzania, co-host of the flagship exercise, holds a strategic partnership from October 2023 and conducts joint EEZ surveillance trilaterally with Mozambique
Mozambique and Madagascar complete the Channel, and Indian warships have repeatedly been first responders there — three were diverted to Beira within hours of Cyclone Idai’s landfall in March 2019

Exercises, Deployments and the Defence Industry

AIKEYME — Africa–India Key Maritime Engagement — was held at Dar-es-Salaam from 13 to 18 April 2025, the first India–Africa multilateral naval exercise, co-hosted with the Tanzania People’s Defence Force
- Ten African navies took part — Tanzania, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles and South Africa
- INS Chennai, INS Kesari and INS Sunayna represented the Indian Navy
- A harbour phase of table-top exercises, command-post drills, anti-piracy planning and boarding training was followed by a sea phase of manoeuvres, search and rescue and helicopter drills
- It is designed as a biennial exercise — India’s first institutionalised continental security mechanism
IOS Sagar ran alongside it. INS Sunayna deployed in April 2025 with a mixed crew drawn from nine African and Indian Ocean partner navies, patrolling partner exclusive economic zones and making port calls — a deployment model in which partner personnel serve aboard rather than being visited. A second edition began on 16 March 2026 with sixteen participating navies, under India’s chairmanship of the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium
IBSAMAR, the trilateral naval exercise with Brazil and South Africa, reached its eighth edition off South Africa in October 2024, with INS Talwar deployed — the only standing military expression of the India–Brazil–South Africa relationship
The India–Africa Defence Dialogue met on the margins of the 2022 defence exhibition at Gandhinagar with fifty African countries, including twenty defence ministers, and adopted the Gandhinagar Declaration on training slots, deputed training teams, joint exercises and defence-studies fellowships. It is meant to convene biennially
The India–Africa Army Chiefs’ Conclave is its land-forces counterpart, and an African Chiefs of Defence Conference is scheduled for Pune on 4–5 November 2026, expected to bring together military leaders from around forty African states alongside a display of Indian equipment
Defence exports have become a real instrument. India’s defence exports reached a record ₹38,424 crore in FY 2025-26, and Tata Advanced Systems inaugurated India’s first overseas defence manufacturing facility at Berrechid near Casablanca on 23 September 2025, producing the WhAP 8×8 wheeled armoured platform for the Royal Moroccan Army and, prospectively, for other African buyers
The honest assessment: this is a fast-growing, low-cost track on which India is genuinely competitive — and still small. India is a marginal arms supplier beside Russia, China, France and Turkey, and its exercise footprint is new enough that one cancelled cycle would undo it

India’s Peacekeeping Record in Africa

This is the oldest security contribution India makes to the continent and it predates every other instrument. The first major deployment was to the Congo in 1960, where an Indian brigade fought in Katanga and where women of the Armed Forces Medical Services served alongside it
Indian contingents have served in about a dozen African missions — among them the Congo, Mozambique, Somalia, Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, Sudan and the Western Sahara
The current deployments are concentrated in five African missions — the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Western Sahara, Sudan, South Sudan and Somalia — with several thousand Indian personnel in blue helmets at any time
The gender contribution is India’s most distinctive. India deployed the first all-women formed police unit in UN peacekeeping history to Liberia in 2007, where it served nearly a decade and was credited with a marked rise in Liberian women’s recruitment into the security forces; Female Engagement Teams have since gone to the Congo and Abyei
What it buys, and what it does not. Peacekeeping gives India standing in African capitals and a moral argument in New York, but it does not translate into votes, and treating it as an entitlement to Security Council membership confuses an equity claim with a structural one
The doctrinal debates — mandate robustness, protection of civilians, the troop-contributor problem — belong to the general account of India at the United Nations; the Africa-specific record is the largest single body of Indian security engagement with the continent

The Multilateral Track: Fifty-Four Votes and What They Are Worth

The arithmetic is the first fact. African states are fifty-four of the United Nations’ 193 members — more than a quarter — and every campaign India runs in a universal forum is counted in that currency: Council reform, climate finance, a development-oriented trade regime, candidatures for UN bodies
The arithmetic is also the first illusion. Africa is not a bloc and does not vote as one: African states have their own candidates, their own creditors and no obligation to convert Indian training slots into Indian votes
India’s offer is unusual in form because it is not framed as an exchange. The tenth Kampala principle ties India’s own demand for a reformed global order to Africa’s, and Indian statements place African representation ahead of, not alongside, India’s claim

“India believes that Africa must have an adequate presence and voice in global decision-making, including in the reformed UN Security Council.”
— S. Jaishankar

Security Council reform and the Ezulwini complication

Africa’s own position is the Ezulwini Consensus, adopted by the African Union Executive Council in March 2005 and reaffirmed by the Sirte Declaration in July that year
Its demand is specific: not fewer than two permanent seats for Africa with all the prerogatives and privileges of permanent membership, including the right of veto, and five non-permanent seats, with the African Union itself selecting the occupants
The honest complication is that this is not the G-4 position. India, Brazil, Germany and Japan propose six new permanent seats — two of them for Africa — and have offered to defer exercising the veto for fifteen years, effectively conceding the substance of the veto to secure the status
Three specific frictions follow
- Africa demands the veto now; the G-4 offers permanence without it, which Ezulwini expressly rejects as entrenching a second class of permanent member
- Africa insists that the African Union nominate its permanent members; the Charter has no mechanism for a regional organisation to hold or allocate a seat
- Any expansion large enough to satisfy Ezulwini, the G-4 and the small-state and Arab-group claims produces a Council the existing permanent five will not accept
The consequence is that India and Africa are aligned in direction and unaligned in formula. India supports African permanent representation without qualification; Africa supports expansion without endorsing the G-4 text. Both blockages are then compounded by China, which has used the intergovernmental negotiation process to prevent a text-based negotiation, and by Uniting for Consensus, which opposes new permanent seats altogether
The Article 108 and 109 amendment barrier — ratification by two-thirds of members including all five permanent members — means the veto operates on the reform of the veto. This is a structural block, not a diplomatic one

The G20 seat — the hardest evidence India has

The African Union became a permanent member of the G20 at the New Delhi Summit on 9 September 2023, on India’s proposal, taking a seat with the same status as the European Union
It is the single most persuasive piece of evidence that India speaks for Africa where Africa is not present: India proposed it, built consensus in advance rather than negotiating on the floor, and secured it in one session
Its value was demonstrated two years later. South Africa held the G20 presidency in 2025 and hosted the Johannesburg Leaders’ Summit on 22–23 November 2025, the first on African soil, which the United States boycotted and which adopted a leaders’ declaration by consensus anyway — a Southern chair holding a multilateral process together without the largest member in the room
The limit is that the African Union’s seat is representation, not decision rights, and the presidency passed to the United States for 2026

Trade, climate and the standing coalitions

At the World Trade Organization, India and African partners have coordinated on the moratorium on customs duties on electronic transmissions — the shared argument being that developing countries surrender revenue and policy space as trade migrates from physical to digital form — on special and differential treatment, on artisanal fishers in the fisheries negotiation, and on the pandemic intellectual-property waiver
On climate, the shared position is common but differentiated responsibilities, adaptation finance and resistance to unilateral border measures — with the qualification that African vulnerability and Indian emissions are not the same negotiating position
On Indian-founded institutions, African states are the largest regional bloc in the International Solar Alliance, and African membership of the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure grows by bilateral accession — Namibia joined in July 2025

South Africa: The Relationship India Has Invested Most In

No other African relationship carries as much history, as much shared political biography or as much multilateral content. It is also the relationship in which the gap between symbolic depth and economic substance is widest.

Gandhi’s twenty-one years, and what South Africa made of him

Mohandas Gandhi arrived in Durban in 1893 as a barrister on a one-year contract and left in 1915 after twenty-one years. He went out a lawyer and came back a political leader
Satyagraha was invented there, not in India — in the campaigns against the registration certificates required of Indians in the Transvaal, against the poll tax and against the invalidation of non-Christian marriages, with the Natal Indian Congress of 1894 as the organisational rehearsal
The relationship is therefore reciprocal. South Africa formed India’s greatest political figure and India returned him to the anti-colonial world, which is why the parallel invocation of Gandhi and Mandela is its standing register

India’s anti-apartheid record

India acted first and acted early. It severed trade relations with South Africa in 1946 — the first country in the world to impose sanctions on the apartheid state — and maintained them until democratic elections in 1994
India also took the question to the United Nations first. On 22 June 1946 it requested that the treatment of Indians in South Africa be placed on the General Assembly’s agenda; the Assembly rejected the claim that the matter was domestic and on 8 December 1946 adopted resolution 44(I) — the first censure of a member state over its racial policies, and India’s first UN resolution
India withdrew its High Commissioner in 1946 and had no diplomatic relations with South Africa for nearly half a century
The support was practical as well as declaratory. India hosted the African National Congress, gave its representatives standing at the Non-Aligned Movement and the Commonwealth, campaigned for the arms and sports boycotts, and treated apartheid as unfinished decolonisation
The Indian South African community — around 1.3 million people, the largest of Indian origin in Africa — was itself inside the struggle. The Natal and Transvaal Indian Congresses allied with the ANC; the 1955 Freedom Charter had Indian signatories; and figures including Ahmed Kathrada were imprisoned on Robben Island alongside Mandela
The claim India can make from this is unusually strong: it is the only external partner whose African credibility was purchased at a cost to itself before there was anything to be gained

Contributions to nation-building after 1994

Political and diplomatic support preceded everything else and made the rest legible. Relations resumed in 1993, Mandela visited India in 1995 — having earlier received the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding while still imprisoned, and later the Bharat Ratna, the only African so honoured
Capacity building for a new state. Technical cooperation slots, training for public servants and cooperation in public administration were offered to an administration that had to be rebuilt out of a segregated civil service — the Indian contribution to a state under construction rather than under repair
The Pan-African e-Network’s South African component connected universities and hospitals into the continental tele-education and telemedicine grid
Information technology and pharmaceuticals were the sectoral contribution. Tata, Tech Mahindra, HCL, Infosys, Mahindra, Larsen and Toubro, Sun Pharma and ICICI Bank established South African operations — a joint study counted around 140 Indian companies with close to US$4 billion invested and over 18,000 direct jobs — and Indian generics entered a health system facing the world’s largest HIV burden
Defence cooperation built the new National Defence Force’s external relationships, with joint naval exercises and, from 2008, the IBSAMAR trilateral series
The distinction that matters: India’s contribution to South African nation-building was institutional and human rather than financial. It did not lend South Africa money — South Africa did not need it — it lent skills, systems, medicines and political legitimacy

The architecture of the partnership

The Red Fort Declaration, signed in New Delhi in March 1997 by Mandela and Prime Minister Deve Gowda, created the strategic partnership and set out cooperation across political, economic, scientific, cultural and defence fields
The Tshwane Declaration of October 2006 deepened it, adding defence, science and technology, and explicitly coordinating positions in multilateral forums
The India–South Africa Joint Ministerial Commission, led by the foreign ministers, is the standing bilateral mechanism, supported by working groups on trade, defence, science and consular matters
A Strategic Dialogue, a Defence Committee and a Joint Trade Committee sit underneath, and the relationship is one of the few India runs with a genuinely institutionalised calendar

Trade, investment and defence

Trade is substantial and flat. Bilateral goods trade has run in the region of US$12–18 billion depending on the reporting basis and the year — about US$11.8 billion in 2024 on one consolidated series, with Indian exports of roughly US$7.2 billion and imports of about US$4.6 billion. India–SACU trade as a whole is around US$20 billion
The composition is stable and revealing. India sends mineral fuels, vehicles, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and machinery; it buys gold and precious stones, coal and other minerals, wood pulp, and iron and steel. It is, on the import side, a classic commodity relationship
Investment runs both ways and is modest. Indian investment into South Africa is over US$1.3 billion on official Indian figures, South African investment into India about US$0.7 billion — small numbers for two of the largest economies of the Global South
The trade agreement has been under discussion for nearly two decades. The India–Southern African Customs Union preferential trade agreement, first mooted in 2008, stalled over tariff concessions in textiles and agriculture; talks were revived at the BRICS trade ministers’ meeting at Jaipur on 6 August 2026, with terms of reference the immediate object and critical minerals, pharmaceuticals and manufacturing the priority sectors
Defence cooperation is real but narrow — the IBSAMAR series, reaching its eighth edition off South Africa in October 2024 with INS Talwar; South African participation in AIKEYME 2025; and a long-running but commercially disappointing defence-industrial relationship

The multilateral half — where the relationship does its heaviest work

IBSA. The dialogue forum was formed in 2003 out of shared disappointment with the development content of the Doha negotiations. Its bilateral significance is that it is the only standing trilateral in which South Africa is a co-equal author rather than a participant
BRICS. South Africa joined in 2011 and remains Africa’s only founding-tier member; India chairs the grouping in 2026 and hosts the eighteenth summit. The two have been consistently aligned on expansion managed cautiously, on development finance through the New Development Bank, and against turning the grouping into an anti-Western front
The G20. South Africa’s 2025 presidency and the Johannesburg summit of 22–23 November 2025 followed India’s 2023 presidency; between them the two carried the African Union into the group and kept debt, climate finance and critical-minerals beneficiation at the centre of its agenda
The TRIPS waiver. India and South Africa jointly proposed the waiver of TRIPS obligations for COVID-19 prevention, containment and treatment on 2 October 2020 — the most consequential Southern initiative in the WTO’s recent history, and one in which the two acted as co-authors from the first draft
Fisheries subsidies. The two hold a common position that disciplines must not fall on artisanal and small-scale fishers in developing countries, and that industrial distant-water fleets are the real object; India presses for a long transition period for developing members
Investment facilitation. India and South Africa were the two members who blocked incorporation of the Investment Facilitation for Development Agreement into the WTO, on the ground that investment rules fall outside its trade mandate — a position held at the fourteenth ministerial conference in March 2026 against a very large majority
The pattern across all six is the same. The two act together where the issue is the boundary of a multilateral regime and the policy space of developing states, and they act as co-authors rather than as a leader and a follower

The frictions, stated plainly

Trade barriers and market access. South African anti-dumping actions, Indian tariff structures and the unresolved preferential agreement keep trade below its potential, and visas and business mobility are the chronic irritant Indian business names first
South Africa’s own economic difficulties — low growth, electricity supply constraints, unemployment above a quarter of the workforce, and fiscal strain — cap what the relationship can deliver regardless of Indian intent
Divergences exist and should not be papered over. South Africa is not a member of the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure, the two have never fully aligned on Security Council reform formulas given Ezulwini, and South African positions on some conflicts run ahead of India’s
The structural problem is that a relationship this rich politically is this thin commercially, and neither government has found the instrument to change that

Between India and South Africa, the multilateral relationship is the substance and the bilateral relationship is the aspiration.

The Other Bilaterals, Weighted by What They Carry

Nigeria — the West African anchor

Africa’s most populous state and India’s largest trading partner in West Africa, and among the continent’s four largest economies, having slipped from first after the 2023–24 naira devaluations. The strategic partnership dates from 2007, and Modi’s visit of 16–17 November 2024 was the first by an Indian prime minister in seventeen years
Trade recovered to about US$9 billion in 2025-26 from a low of roughly US$7.9 billion in 2023-24, having peaked near US$15 billion in 2021-22 when Nigerian crude was a larger share of Indian imports
The relationship has moved beyond oil. More than 200 Indian companies operate across pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, power, construction and consumer goods, employing on the order of 100,000 Nigerians — India is among the largest employers in the country after the federal government
India supplies roughly 40 per cent of Nigeria’s pharmaceutical imports and has invested about US$4 billion in manufacturing them locally
Defence cooperation runs back to the 1960s, when India helped establish the Nigerian Defence Academy and the naval college; current tracks are training, counter-terrorism dialogue and prospective aircraft procurement
Modi was conferred the Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger, the country’s second-highest honour and the first to a foreign leader since Queen Elizabeth II in 1969

Egypt — the oldest political relationship in Africa

The Nehru–Nasser axis was one of the two founding relationships of non-alignment alongside Tito’s Yugoslavia, and produced the Bandung and Belgrade sequence
Relations were revived after a long drift. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was chief guest at the Republic Day parade in January 2023, and Modi’s Cairo visit in June 2023 created a strategic partnership
Defence cooperation has become the most active strand — a defence cooperation memorandum in 2022, the Cyclone special-forces exercise from January 2023, air-force exchanges and navy-to-navy staff talks, and a defence-industrial agenda built around co-production
Bilateral trade runs at around US$6–7 billion, dominated by petroleum products, chemicals and pharmaceuticals
The strategic value is the Suez Canal, through which a very large share of India–Europe trade passes, and which the Red Sea disruption from 2023 showed to be a single point of failure for Indian commerce
Egypt is also a BRICS member from 2024 and a New Development Bank shareholder, so it is a partner in Indian multilateral vehicles as well as a bilateral one

Kenya and Tanzania — the East African hub

This is where the diaspora is oldest and the commercial presence densest, dating to the dhow trade and consolidated by the railway-building migrations of the nineteenth century
Kenya — trade of about US$3.35 billion in 2023-24, overwhelmingly Indian exports; India its second-largest investor with over sixty major companies; 80,000 people of Indian origin; the BAHARI maritime vision and a defence framework from President Ruto’s December 2023 visit; and a US$250 million credit line for agricultural modernisation
Tanzania — a strategic partnership from October 2023; trade around US$7.9 billion in 2023-24; Indian investment of about US$4 billion; over US$1.1 billion of credit lines for water supply; and the first overseas campus of an Indian Institute of Technology, at Zanzibar from 6 November 2023 — the most striking institutional export India has made to Africa
Both are AIKEYME participants and Tanzania is India’s co-host, which makes East Africa the region where the commercial, diasporic and security tracks intersect

Ethiopia — the seat of the African Union

Ethiopia hosts the African Union Commission, which makes the bilateral relationship India’s channel to the continental institution
Modi visited Addis Ababa on 16–17 December 2025 — the first Indian prime ministerial visit — addressed the Ethiopian parliament, received the Grand Nishan of Ethiopia and created a strategic partnership
Indian firms have invested over US$5 billion in textiles, agriculture, manufacturing and health, creating more than 75,000 jobs — India is among Ethiopia’s largest foreign investors
Agreements covered technology, mining, green energy and defence, including an Indian-built data centre for the Ethiopian foreign ministry
Ethiopia joined BRICS in 2024 and is among the states admitted to the New Development Bank, though it has not completed accession

Mauritius, Mozambique, Ghana and Namibia

Mauritius is treated above as a maritime partner, but the relationship is wider than the naval one. About 70 per cent of the population is of Indian origin, India has given close to US$1 billion in development assistance over a decade, and the double taxation avoidance treaty made Mauritius for two decades the largest single source of foreign direct investment into India — a routing artefact corrected by the 2016 protocol, and the reason headline Indian investment figures for Africa must be read with care
Mozambique carries India’s largest single energy stake in Africa — ONGC Videsh and other public sector companies in the Rovuma basin gas fields, which account for the overwhelming share of Indian investment there. It is also a pulses supplier under a guaranteed-procurement memorandum and a naval partner in trilateral patrolling
Ghana was raised to a comprehensive partnership during Modi’s visit of 2–3 July 2025, the first by an Indian prime minister in three decades: trade of about US$3 billion, over US$450 million of Indian concessional finance, an ICT centre of excellence from 2003, and a target of doubling trade in five years
Namibia, visited on 9 July 2025, joined the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure and the Global Biofuels Alliance, agreed to adopt India’s Unified Payments Interface, and signed on entrepreneurship and health — a small relationship that cleanly demonstrates the digital-public-infrastructure offer

Partner	What it carries for India	The binding constraint
South Africa	The deepest political history; the standing multilateral partnership	Flat trade; no preferential agreement after nearly two decades
Nigeria	West Africa’s largest market; 200 Indian firms; crude	Security, foreign-exchange scarcity, volatile trade
Egypt	Suez; the non-aligned inheritance; the most active defence track	An economy under severe fiscal strain
Kenya	The commercial hub of East Africa; maritime vision statement	A large and politically sensitive trade imbalance
Tanzania	AIKEYME co-host; the IIT campus; water-sector credit	Execution pace on the credit-funded projects
Ethiopia	The African Union’s seat; US$5bn of Indian investment	Conflict risk and macroeconomic distress
Mauritius	The closest relationship India has; MAHASAGAR’s birthplace	Small; the treaty-routing distortion in the FDI data
Mozambique	Rovuma gas; pulses; the Channel	Insurgency in Cabo Delgado has delayed the gas projects
Djibouti	Access at Bab-el-Mandeb; the Raahat precedent	China’s only overseas base is there
Seychelles	Charting, patrol assets, community projects	Assumption Island failed; basing is politically closed
Ghana and Namibia	West and Southern African entry points; digital adoption	Very small bases to build on
Morocco	India’s first overseas defence manufacturing plant	A new relationship with little else in it yet

What the bilateral record shows

India’s Africa policy is continental in rhetoric and bilateral in practice, and the collapse of the summit has made that more true, not less. With no forum meeting for eleven years, everything of substance has been transacted country by country
The evidence is in the travel. Three Africa trips in a single year — Mauritius in March 2025, Ghana and Namibia in July 2025, South Africa in November 2025, Ethiopia in December 2025 — against no continental meeting at all
The bilateral turn has real advantages. It permits differentiation and avoids the lowest-common-denominator communiqué, and Indian resident missions now cover 46 African states
It also has a real cost. Fifty-four relationships cannot be run at depth by a foreign service of India’s size, the continental institutions get attention only when a leader passes through, and the states that are neither large, resource-rich nor maritime receive nothing at all
The reconciliation is not either-or. A continental mechanism is what makes the bilateral work legible as a policy rather than as a sequence of visits — which is why the missing summit is a strategic problem and not merely an embarrassment

Conclusion

India will not out-build China in Africa and the serious Indian argument has stopped trying. The trade ratio is roughly four to one, the lending ratio roughly fifteen to one, and no Indian budget changes either
The comparative advantage is real but of a different kind: a settled diaspora, an alumni network inside African administrations, a development record African states can borrow from, medicines their health systems depend on, digital systems that transfer capability rather than debt, and a commercial presence that employs locally
Every one of those is a stock that depreciates if it is not spent, and India’s characteristic failure has been to announce rather than deliver — the corridor that was never funded, the summit postponed three times, the credit lines that disburse at a fraction of what is pledged
The maritime and defence track is the exception. AIKEYME, IOS Sagar, the defence dialogue, the chairmanship of the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium and the first overseas defence plant are recent, institutionalised on a cycle, and in a domain where India is genuinely competitive
The multilateral record is India’s strongest single claim. The African Union’s G20 seat, the joint intellectual-property waiver, the artisanal-fishers position and the investment-facilitation block are not gestures; they are outcomes India helped produce, and they are what “speaking for Africa” looks like when it is true
South Africa is the test case for the whole proposition. It is the relationship in which India’s history, its diaspora, its democratic affinity and its multilateral coalition-building all converge — and in which trade has been flat for a decade and a preferential agreement has been under negotiation for eighteen years
The lesson generalises. India’s problem in Africa is not that China is bigger. It is that India’s advantages are political and its deficits are administrative, and administrative deficits are the ones a state is supposed to be able to fix

India competes with China in Africa on the only ground where scale is not the answer — and it has yet to build the delivery machinery that makes the answer count.

Previous Year Questions

Examine India and South-Africa co-operation through bilateral and multi-lateral forums. (2026)
Discuss some of the key drivers of India’s new interests in Africa which might help in developing long-term comparative advantage over China. (2025) — the comparison with China is developed above; the drivers themselves are set out in the companion account of the evolution of India’s Africa policy
Identify India’s contributions and assistance in the process of nation-building in South Africa. (2009)