India Is Hosting the 4th India-Africa Forum Summit: Why Now and What to Expect? |
The Pulse | Diplomacy | South Asia
India Is Hosting the 4th India-Africa Forum Summit: Why Now and What to Expect?
For the first time in 11 years, African leaders and multilateral organizations will convene in the Indian capital.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi stands ready to receive the heads of delegations the 3rd India Africa Forum Summit 2015, in New Delhi on Oct. 29, 2015.
India is hosting its fourth leader-level Africa summit (the India-Africa Forum Summit, IAFS-IV) on May 31 under the official theme “IA SPIRIT”: India Africa Strategic Partnership for Innovation, Resilience, and Inclusive Transformation. The summit is significant. For the first time in 11 years, African leaders and multilateral organizations will convene in the Indian capital.
The return of the IAFS responds to the contemporary rupture of the international order that has left India in a particularly difficult position, prompting New Delhi to shore up ties with its traditional friends in the Global South. As described by India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, the meeting will be “a message of stability in a turbulent world, of reliability in an uncertain one and of solidarity in difficult times.”
Politically, the event is a big deal. Successive Indian governments have positioned the country as the “leader of the Global South,” particularly drawing on strong India-Africa ties to evidence this claim. Whether recognized outside India or not, this claimed leadership is designed to support the country’s global clout, with the ability to mobilize the majority of countries and shape international decisions.
India’s Most Vulnerable Moment for Decades
This summit comes at a particularly crucial time. New Delhi’s boldest geopolitical bet over the last three decades has been on the United States, with closer ties delivering important cooperation around military procurement, security and intelligence sharing, and finance and technology for economic growth. However, from 2025, President Donald Trump torpedoed relations with India in short order, with trust now at a new low. Simultaneously, Pakistan and China remain major threats, with the former proving surprisingly effective in responding to last year’s Operation Sindoor using Chinese military kit.
New Delhi’s other key move over the last few decades has been to boost ties with the Gulf states, especially the UAE, which have been critical for remittances, financial investment, and energy. India is heavily dependent on fossil fuel imports, buying 88 percent of its oil internationally. However, India’s Gulf partnerships are now jeopardized by the Israeli-U.S. conflict with Iran and the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz. In the short term, remittances have shrunk, and critical energy scarcities are building, particularly for cooking gas. These impacts may become longer term given the damage to energy infrastructure. Furthermore, there may be decreased Gulf financial investment in India as the region turns inward to shore up domestic economies.
This is perhaps India’s most vulnerable moment for decades. In response, New Delhi has significantly expanded ties with Europe, concluding the EU and U.K. trade deals, reaching major arms deals, and launching a technology dialogue. Europe is perhaps the only partner that could replace what New Delhi had hoped to receive from the United States.
However, India’s foreign policy strategists also seek to maintain relations with the Global South and the country’s “Southern” identity – hence reconvening the India-Africa leaders’ event.
A Decade-Long Hiatus of the India-Africa Summit
The summit has been a long time coming. The first India-Africa Forum Summit (IAFS I) was held in 2008, followed by IAFS-II in 2011. Both were comparatively small, following the African Union’s Banjul Formula to invite 15 representative leaders. The third summit in 2015 was a far grander affair, inviting all leaders and lavishing them with red carpet treatment in Delhi.
The fourth event was supposed to follow three years later but suffered numerous delays, reflecting a drift in India’s Africa policy. It was postponed in 2019 (by then already a year late) by the Ebola crisis in West Africa, only for the COVID-19 pandemic to follow in 2020. During this extended hiatus, India’s diplomatic attention shifted: toward growing its U.S. ties, managing a series of global crises, hosting the G-20, and then this year’s AI summit. India’s G-20 presidency did deliver on an African initiative to give the African Union a seat in the grouping. However, India’s famously constrained diplomatic capacity was stretched too thin by these multiple summits and the growing bilateral attention New Delhi received from the United States and Europe.
Additionally, experts suggest there were problems of working through the bureaucratically-challenged African Union, and a specific obstacle of Niger’s 2023 military coup, as the plan had been to use that country’s new Indian-financed conference center to host IAFS-IV.
The absence of the India-Africa summit since 2015 is notable. Over the same period, China, the EU, France, and Russia, to mention a few, have held a slew of similar leader-level political summits. Additionally, Indian presidential and prime ministerial visits to Africa decreased since 2019.
Therefore, the return of the high-level political gathering will be designed to reaffirm Africa’s importance to India. Previous iterations of the IAFS were key in boosting the relationship, not just for their political signaling, but also for the intense diplomatic momentum they generated, which previously culminated in pledges on new development........