Moral geographies: Indian exceptionalism, Africa, and the politics of South–South cooperation

This article seeks to understand the evolution of India’s political relations and development cooperation with Africa, in the context of India’s ambitions of playing a leading role in the Third World turned Global South. India’s development cooperation with African nations was informed in the early decades after the country’s independence by a sense of solidarity. It is argued that despite a sense of Third Worldist solidarity, Indian actors partially understood Africa and Africans in relation to themselves through racialised ideas of ‘progress’ which originated as part of the British imperial project. The justification for India’s development cooperation with Africa came to be rooted in India’s conceptions of its own exceptionalism, which has metamorphosed over the decades from a cultural-civilisational project to incorporate understandings of economic and technological progress, especially after neoliberal reforms of the 1990s. We place the rhetoric that characterises India’s Africa policy within a broad framework of decolonial international relations literature by Global South scholars, thereby showing how relations between India and Africa have been shaped by perceptions of Africa and Africans in the longue durée, and accounting for why Indian actors have imagined their role in Africa in terms of a mixture of paternalism and benevolence.