Kenneth King and Meera Venkatachalam helm this effort at exploring different aspects of India’s development diplomacy towards the African continent. Although India and China are said to be competing for influence on the continent, the state of academic research on Africa from these two Asian countries mirrors the state of their respective strategic ties. China’s relationship with the African continent, powered by its economic muscle, is considerably more extensive than India’s (despite the latter’s historical diasporic advantage). And this is also the case for academic work. Scholarship on ‘China in Africa’ dwarfs what is produced on ‘India in Africa’. In addition, much of the India in Africa literature tends to be painfully descriptive, sometimes a straight reproduction of what Indian government ministries put up on their webpages. Fine-grained analytical takes – not to speak of theoretical efforts – are few and far between.
Considering this background, India’s Development and Soft Power Diplomacy in Africa is a remarkable effort. The merits of the book are many. The volume brings together scholars from several disciplines – anthropology, area studies (multiple regions), development studies, geography, history, sociology, defence studies, political science and international relations. This lavish cocktail allows the reader to appreciate a multidisciplinary perspective. Each contribution is crisp and well researched, and although similar themes are explored in various articles, repetitions are minimal. Some chapters are description-heavy – valuable, undoubtedly, for some audiences, but relatively dry in prose and content for readers such as this reviewer. But there are several thoughtful questions addressed throughout the text. One such question is: how is Africa imagined in the Hindutva worldview? The book centres Hindutva as the new ideology of the Indian government and distils how a Hindutva-inflected world vision shapes the contours of India’s foreign policy towards the African continent. The answers are perhaps not yet sufficiently clear; but this is less the fault of the researchers and more an issue with ‘Hindutva’ ideology as a slowly unleashing catastrophe.
In nine chapters, spread over four thematic sections, the book covers a range of significant issues and themes on India’s soft power, such as technology training and human resource development, vaccine diplomacy, statues, the Pan-African e-network and business efforts. The last section on African entrepreneurs and African students zooms in on the problem of Indian racism – a recurring issue throughout the book. The revelations of how Africans face extreme racism at the hands of Indians are poignantly hard-hitting – and sadly not shocking any more. Despite widespread knowledge about the treatment of Africans by Indians in both India and Africa, little action has been taken by either the Indian government or Indian communities. In addition to the chapters, the editors’ introduction and the conclusion are valuable from the point of view of summarizing past scholarship and highlighting possible future avenues for scholarship on India in Africa.
No book, however, is perfect. Interestingly, one might assume that cultural and developmentalist perspectives would be marginal within scholarship dealing with diplomacy. But in the case of India–Africa, it is ‘diplomacy’ scholarship – in the conventional sense, one that deals with political interactions among actors – that is largely non-existent. As the editors also emphasize, there is a lot of self-celebratory literature from India that refers to the country’s contributions to decolonizing and development efforts in Africa, but rarely in their particulars. There is little work that zooms in on the diplomatic and political engagements between India and African countries. Indeed, there is not a single book-length study on how India assisted the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, perhaps the most explored African country in Indian scholarship. It is politics, rather than culture, that is understudied. This contrasts with the Indian international relations and political science scholarship on North America, Europe and East Asia. Although this is a book about ‘developmental policy’ and not diplomacy per se, archive-based analyses of diplomatic and political engagements on developmental assistance would have added factual substance to the usual ululations about India’s great support of Africa – or would have assisted with moderating those claims.
Furthermore, as important as this book is, it focuses heavily on a relatively well-studied region of the continent: Eastern Africa. Other African regions are marginalized in the discussion. Partly, this is a function of the nature of Indian developmental assistance and diaspora politics, which have a long lineage in Eastern Africa. But surprisingly, even Southern Africa, which otherwise acquires considerable real estate in scholarship on India in Africa, gets little mention. From an Indian strategic point of view, Western Africa, an important region, also remains curiously absent from the book.
All in all, this is an insightful and timely intervention that will be an invaluable resource for African studies scholarship in India and elsewhere.
