Africa is no longer shaped by bases, coups, or headline-grabbing arms deliveries. Power now runs through institutions, standards, and systems of sovereignty.
Some actors translate this into dependency through scale or force. India stands apart, advancing its interests most effectively when African partners retain agency.
This is not soft power versus hard power, but capacity power versus dependency power.
Africa is not one arena but several, shaped by chokepoints. Along the Indian Ocean rim, from Djibouti down the Swahili Coast to Mozambique and across to Madagascar and Mauritius, Africa links to India through sea lanes carrying energy, food, and trade.
The Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb connect East Africa to the Mediterranean, while the Cape route becomes decisive when the Red Sea is disrupted. The Sahel is landlocked and coup-prone, increasingly defined by Western retreat, while West Africa forms its own gravitational field around the Gulf of Guinea and major ports.
India’s credibility in Africa begins with memory.
Shaped by empire, it understands the difference between development and domination. Its ties to Africa are social as much as diplomatic. More than three million people of Indian origin live across the continent, the legacy of labour routes, merchant networks, and later migration.
When India backed the African Union’s permanent membership in the G20, it reinforced a simple truth: representation is power, and Africa is not a guest in global governance.
Economics is where India’s engagement becomes measurable.
India-Africa trade fluctuates between 80 and 100 billion dollars annually, with cumulative Indian investment approaching 75 billion dollars, placing Africa among India’s most important economic partners. The pattern matters more than the decimal point. India is building a commercially grounded relationship large enough to matter, without mortgaging sovereignty.
India’s restraint is not a weakness. It allows African states to say “yes” without losing the ability to say “no”.
India’s development finance is often misread because it does not resemble Beijing’s grand packages or heavily conditioned Western programmes. Its backbone is concessional finance and project lending, with nearly 200 lines of credit extended across more than forty African states to fund railways, transmission, vehicles, agriculture, and industrial capacity.
This is not charity. It links African demand to Indian execution capacity and builds commercial ecosystems without forcing capital into single-vendor dependency. The weakness is equally clear: dispersed projects demand relentless follow-through, and delays quietly erode trust.
India reshapes the contest most effectively where infrastructure is unseen. Knowledge platforms and digital rails matter more than showcase projects.
From early pan-African digital education initiatives to payment interoperability, India has focused on everyday systems: launching UPI and RuPay rails in Mauritius and signing digital payment agreements with partners such as Namibia and Togo. Those who build the rails of daily economic life shape sovereignty more durably than those who sell drones.
Mauritius illustrates what Indian partnership looks like when influence is built without a parallel state. There are no bases, no long concessions over ports or airports, no foreign-branded institutions imprinting identity.
Instead, India’s presence runs through everyday systems that organise sovereignty. Payment interoperability came first: UPI and RuPay rails were launched jointly, embedding Indian standards into daily transactions and remittance flows.
Digital agreements followed, aligning regulation rather than replacing it, while training moved alongside finance, leaving Mauritian institutions visibly in charge.
What emerges is not an “Indian footprint” in the Turkish or Chinese sense, but a more restrained and durable model: operational dependency without symbolic dependency. Mauritius does not look Indian. It functions better.
Nothing announces India’s presence. That is precisely why it endures.
Health is another arena where India’s engagement is both material and strategic. India supplies over half of Africa’s generic medicines, integrating into clinics and pharmacies rather than summits.
This produces legitimacy that is lived rather than proclaimed and reduces vulnerability to coercion by suppliers who treat medical access as leverage. Influence endures when it is useful and difficult to replace.
Security is where comparisons sharpen. India has long contributed to UN peacekeeping in Africa. It has expanded its maritime role from anti-piracy operations off the coast of Somalia to trilateral naval exercises with Mozambique and Tanzania, as well as coastal radar cooperation with Indian Ocean partners. Its security footprint reinforces state capacity and maritime awareness rather than substituting for sovereignty.
Mozambique and Tanzania show what an Indian security partnership looks like without bases or permanent deployments. Training, maritime surveillance, and joint exercises strengthen local control over coastal space while leaving command, symbols, and legitimacy firmly national. The absence of an Indian security architecture is the point.
Somaliland already matters in practice, even without formal recognition. Trade flows through Berbera, and Indian goods sustain its port economy.
In the Gulf of Aden, India’s sustained anti-piracy deployments help secure the shipping lanes on which Somaliland’s coast depends. This is not diplomatic recognition, but de facto relevance: cooperation through commerce and maritime security, where sovereignty is disputed but daily functions are not.
Turkey’s Africa strategy reflects a different model. In Somalia, training, logistics, finance, education, media, and air connectivity operate under a single foreign umbrella, creating a layered presence that fuses institutions and logistics into a continuum of influence.
Standards, including halal certification, function as tools of market control, while private security firms extend their reach with deniability.
Turkey is not merely competing for contracts; it is competing to become the sovereign default. India counters this not by imitation but by offering capability without cultural capture and cooperation without an identity overlay.
Françafrique imposed order through security guarantees, monetary frameworks, and political stewardship, imperfect but grounded in continuity and responsibility.
Turkey builds influence through identity, embedding education, religion, media, and infrastructure into everyday governance. India does neither. It advances capacity without symbols, systems without flags, and influence without replacing the state itself.
China remains the benchmark for scale and speed.
With trade volumes nearing 280 billion dollars and financing commitments measured in the tens of billions, its model turns size into leverage. India cannot compete on scale, so it competes on optionality.
When African states can source medicines, training, digital systems, and project finance from multiple partners, the cost of saying no to any single actor falls. That is balancing through choice, not confrontation.
Russia follows yet another path. In parts of the Sahel, security assistance and regime protection are traded directly for influence, resources, and political alignment, creating a shortcut model built on coercion rather than capacity.
India responds not by lecturing on democracy but by supporting institution-building and security cooperation that strengthen national control without entrenching dependence on foreign fighters.
Power is increasingly contested in information ecosystems. Africa’s publics are young, connected, and sceptical. Russia, China, and Turkey invest heavily in narrative and framing, while silence cedes the field to others.
India is not challenging Western values in Africa; it is operationalising them where Western engagement has often fallen short. This is not a peripheral issue but a strategic one.
Where African states have credible partners that deliver on capacity, connectivity, and security cooperation without ideological alignment or the mortgaging of sovereignty, coercive models struggle to dominate.
Those threatened by India’s partner model are threatened structurally.
Dependency weakens when alternatives exist, and influence shifts from leverage to credibility. Despite its constraints, India’s proposition remains distinctive and scalable: a partnership that builds state capacity, commerce that creates markets, and security cooperation that strengthens sovereignty.
Africa does not need a new patron. It needs partners confident enough to gain influence by sharing it – and India can credibly do so.
- Shay Gal is a strategic analyst specialising in international security, foreign policy, and geopolitical crisis management. He advises senior government and defence leaders, with a focus on public diplomacy and strategic communications. His work examines power dynamics, hybrid competition, and the institutional and identity forces shaping state decision-making.
- VIEWS PERSONAL OF THE AUTHOR
