Recasting India-Africa engagement as a security compact

The postponement of the Fourth India–Africa Forum Summit (IAFS-IV), prompted by the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, is a pause in diplomacy, not in strategic necessity. The Western Indian Ocean does not observe summit schedules. India’s trade routes, energy supplies, and long-term security interests are bound up with Africa’s littoral geography in ways that make sustained engagement not a diplomatic courtesy but an operational imperative. The relationship has too long been shaped by a donor-recipient vocabulary, India the provider, Africa the beneficiary. That framing was always analytically incomplete. It is now strategically dangerous. Consider…