The year 2025 is sometimes compared to 1955, when emerging countries aspired to create a platform in Bandung, Indonesia, to fulfil their aspirations. At that time, the Cold War had begun, leading to bipolarity, and later, unipolarity. But then, the number of conflicts raging across the world were perhaps fewer than today, which is marked by several active wars. Many of the countries that participated in the Bandung process are now embroiled in various conflicts, highlighting the complex and volatile nature of international relations in 2025.
Trust and dependability are in short supply, with old alliances and new strategic equations often unsteady. New great powers have emerged, like China, which seeks to shape its vision of the world and expects others to accept it. On September 3, 2025, China held a Victory Day parade marking its triumph over Japan in 1946, commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II. China then was neither a major power nor a significant contributor to the war effort at that time, unlike India. Yet today, China positions itself as a founding member of the United Nations and a defender of the global order, while founding countries like the U.S. under President Donald Trump bend the same international norms to suit their interests.
While China, already a major trading partner with its region, is pursuing to form ever deeper supply chains with its Asian neighbours.[1] The U.S. is focused on reordering its traditional relationships, sometimes taking its old friends for granted and engaging in tariff wars and sanctions. Some of these include curbing the H-1B program and challenging the strategic autonomy of various countries like India, South Africa, Brazil and Indonesia. Allies like the EU, Japan, Korea and Australia are deeply singed by fraternal challenges to the way they were.[2]
India finds itself in a delicate position—wishing for better relations with China, yet facing difficulties due to China’s ambitions to dominate strategically, economically, technologically, and politically. India believes in an Asian Century but to China it means a Chinese-led Asian century which India, Japan and others do not subscribe to.
Since the friendship with the U.S. has become as complex as the tenuous China relationship, India needs strategic space and flexibility. Asian friends like Japan and Indonesia, ASEAN and African interlocutors are now urgently underscoring the importance of engaging other parts of the Global South, which are equally challenged by emerging bipolarity, restrictions on their strategic autonomy, and rising global tensions.
India’s good relations with ASEAN and Africa, nurtured over time, are vital. For example, in 2025 itself ASEAN leaders from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore have visited India, with a Vietnam visit expected soon. Similarly, Africa has seen engagement through visits by African leaders like the President of Angola and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visits to Ghana and Namibia, BRICS collaborations, and regional summits. However, the institutionalized India-Africa Forum Summit (IAFS) has not convened since 2015, a decade during which global and regional dynamics have evolved.
It is therefore timely for India and Africa to revive and strengthen their cooperation through an IAFS IV, focusing on joint efforts to enhance prosperity, capacity, and strategic autonomy, along with mutual trade, investment, and technology exchange. The recent ASEAN Economic Ministers’ meeting, which included discussions on enhancing the ASEAN-India trade in goods, reflects a renewed focus on strengthening economic ties. The revised ASEAN-India Trade in Goods Agreement (AITIGA) may be completed by the end of 2025, given a boost by the annual India ASEAN Summit to be held in October this year.
Building robust supply chains and fostering reciprocity with Global South friends, is therefore crucial. With India’s increasing energy imports and Africa’s trade surplus with India, opportunities exist to challenge Chinese exports in Africa and to enhance Indian projects via revised line-of-credit policies, possibly rupee-denominated, reducing debt burdens. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), despite uneven implementation, offers substantial opportunities for Indian MSMEs to invest and expand regional trade.[3]
India’s trade with ASEAN exceeds $120 billion annually, and with Africa, it surpasses $100 billion.[4] Indian exports to Africa are around $45 billion, more than the $40 billion exports to ASEAN, highlighting the importance of these relationships. The nature of India’s economy—requiring energy and raw materials—generates trade surpluses in certain commodities with Africa and ASEAN, facilitating mutually beneficial supply chains.
Rather than restricting exports, India should aim to enlarge them, boosting projects, capital, and technology transfer. This will build economic confidence and strategic autonomy in the Global South. For after the U.S., China, UAE, and the EU, Africa and ASEAN are India’s largest $100 billion-plus economic partners.
Key countries with greater absorption capacity and business activity—particularly those bordering the South China Sea and Indian Ocean—should be prioritised in India’s strategic and defence dynamics. Recent sales of strategic weaponry like the BrahMos missile to the Philippines and the setting up of a Tata armoured vehicle factory in Morocco to make 8×8 Wheeled Armoured Platform (WhAP) vehicles for the Moroccan army and for export across Africa[5] indicate that, despite slow progress, efforts to deepen defence and strategic cooperation are bearing fruit.
The Bandung moment now presents an opportunity for greater emphasis on the Global South. India championed this through its G20 Presidency in 2023 and through three Voice of Global South Summits in 2023-2024. It is therefore time for India, Africa and ASEAN among others to re-burnish their Global South credentials and use that identity as a platform to engage each other more deeply. Of ASEAN’s dialogue partners, India is the only one that truly belongs to the Global South. Similarly, India is the developing country partner of Africa that the G7 countries associate with for meaningful trilateral partnerships in Africa. Africa and ASEAN would do well to see India through that prism, rather than treating it as just another partner.
India’s partnership with Africa aligns with its own needs for energy, agriculture, healthcare, infrastructure, and digital infrastructure and long-term collaboration across sectors like power, agriculture, and skills transfer.[6]
Similarly with ASEAN, the cooperation between the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (AOIP) and the India Pacific Oceans Initiative (IPOI) include the four priority areas of maritime cooperation, connectivity, the SDGs (sustainable development goals). The latter, cooperation and the non-strategic maritime cooperation are socio-cultural cooperation while the connectivity and economic aspects are cross-cutting.[7]
India needs to diversify its approaches. It needn’t veer away from major markets with whom we have concerns, like the U.S., the EU and China. Instead, it should take out time, energy and resources to developing the Global South narrative so assiduously built up since 2023.
Gurjit Singh is a former Indian Ambassador to Germany. He is currently promoting the impact investment movement for implementing SDGs in Africa.
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References:
[1] Rana Mitter, in a show of power, China’s strange bedfellows signal a new world order, The Observer, 7 September 2025,https://observer.co.uk/news/international/article/in-a-show-of-power-chinas-strange-bedfellows-signal-a-new-world-order
[2] Amitava Acharya, Trump Is Creating a Post-Western World, Project Syndicate Quarterly, 7 June 2025,https://www.project-syndicate.org/magazine/trump-foreign-policy-damage-to-west-opens-door-for-the-rest-by-amitav-acharya-2025-06
[3] Gurjit Singh, Reset Ties with Africa, Deccan Herald, 25 September 2025, https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/reset-ties-with-africa-3742012
[4] India-Africa trade surpassed $100 bn in 2024-25: MoS Kirti Vardhan Singh. Business Standard 27 August 2025, https://www.business-standard.com/external-affairs-defence-security/news/india-africa-trade-surpasses-100-bn-in-2024-25-says-kirti-vardhan-singh-125082700516_1.html
[5] Raksha Mantri to Visit Morocco on September 22-23, 2025 , PIB. 20 September 2025,https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2168847
[6] Lok Sabha QUESTION NO- 2166 STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP WITH AFRICA, 1 August 2025, MEA https://www.mea.gov.in/lok-sabha.htm?dtl/39914/QUESTION+NO+2166+STRATEGIC+PARTNERSHIP+WITH+AFRICA
[7] Gurjit Singh, The India ASEAN AOIP-IPOI cooperation, ORF, 15 October 2022 https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/the-india-asean-aoip-ipoi-cooperation