Explaining India’s Africa policy: power ambitions and pro-active strategies

With the rise in India’s power and economic potential, its needs and interests have been expanded and resultantly its engagement with the African region has increased. India’s Africa policy, while rhetorically couched the narratives of South-South cooperation, post-colonial sentiments and mutual and reciprocal development, reveals strategic paradox. Behind the altruistic rhetoric there is a strategic agenda of expanding influence and prioritized access to raw materials, consumer market and curbing Chinese expansion. Where it projects itself as a responsible actor and a global mentor (Vishwa guru), it is proactively pursuing its national interests, mainly its maximisation of power and status through economic, geopolitical, and diplomatic strategies. Strategies have been adopted on the premise that they will ensure its national interest in becoming a major power and the leader of the South. India’s Africa policy, shaped by both domestic and international factors, is best explained through a combined lens of internal needs and external opportunities and constraints. This paper hypothesises that India’s Africa policy is constrained by the regional and international environment (like competition with China and strategic partnership with the US and others in the region and beyond), which constrains its behaviour and its domestic needs (like energy security, raw resources, and coalition legitimacy through economic development) and motivates its proactive engagements with the African region. This paper is an effort to dissect and explain India’s Africa policy, its ambitions, and its strategies to attain its interests. It examines at length India’s major power ambitions as well as its geo-economic, geopolitical, and diplomatic strategies to achieve desired goals. A neo-classical realist framework of analysis has been utilised for the empirical analysis of the phenomenon.