Decolonisation for Some, Hegemony for Others: India’s Strategic Double Game in the Global South

Editorial Note

This article is a direct response to “Rethinking India–Africa Solidarity in an Era of Disrupted Global Order,” by Dr John Kayode Fayemi, published by the Observer Research Foundation on 21 May 2026 as part of its series India–Africa Relations at a Strategic Crossroads: IAFS IV and Beyond. While couched in the language of solidarity, strategic partnership, and South-South cooperation, the emerging policy narrative positioning India as a natural co-architect of Africa’s strategic future deserves far more critical scrutiny. Africa’s sovereign right to engage any external partner is unquestionable. What is open to examination, however, is whether India’s anti-colonial self-presentation, strategic conduct, and geopolitical alignments justify the moral and political leadership role increasingly being projected for it across the Global South.

The Performance of Anti-Colonial Virtue

Modern India has invested heavily in cultivating a diplomatic identity rooted in anti-colonial legitimacy. It presents itself as the inheritor of anti-imperial struggle, the political descendant of Bandung-era solidarity, and a principled advocate for the aspirations of the Global South. That narrative is not without emotional force. Anti-colonial legitimacy remains one of the most politically valuable currencies in international affairs, especially among states whose modern identities emerged through resistance to imperial domination. Historical memory matters, and the symbolic authority associated with anti-colonial struggle continues to carry moral weight. The difficulty, however, is not in invoking anti-colonial history, but in the increasingly selective manner in which that history is deployed, less as a governing principle than as a strategic instrument.

Anti-colonial doctrine cannot be treated as sacred when useful and optional when inconvenient. A principle that applies only where it aligns with geopolitical convenience ceases to function as a principle at all. It becomes an instrument of statecraft, invoked where advantageous and quietly abandoned where complications arise. This selectivity is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. India opposes certain forms of domination while accommodating others, invokes sovereignty in some contexts while normalising strategic exceptionalism in others, and speaks fluently in the language of partnership while frequently behaving in ways that imply hierarchy, supervision, or entitlement. That is not anti-colonial consistency. It is geopolitical selectivity dressed in emancipatory vocabulary.

The Chagos Test: Where Principle Meets Convenience

No case exposes this contradiction more clearly than Chagos, where the distance between anti-colonial rhetoric and strategic convenience becomes especially difficult to conceal. India has long projected itself as a principled advocate of decolonisation, yet when the Chagos question evolved into a politically convenient anti-colonial narrative centred almost exclusively on Mauritius and the United Kingdom, structurally inconvenient questions were quietly pushed aside. Chief among these is the omission of the Maldives from the decolonisation record under Article 73(e) of the United Nations Charter. This is not some obscure administrative technicality of interest only to archival specialists. Documentary omissions shape legal and political narratives because they define who appears within recognised decolonisation frameworks and who is rendered invisible to them.

India, a state that has positioned itself as an elder statesman of anti-colonial diplomacy and served as the first chair of the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization, cannot plausibly claim indifference to the significance of documentary exclusion in decolonisation processes. Silence in such circumstances is not neutral. Choosing not to interrogate structural omissions while later embracing outcomes produced within those constrained frameworks is itself a political act. That contradiction becomes even more pronounced when one considers the legal compression that has surrounded the Chagos debate.

The 2019 International Court of Justice advisory opinion addressed a specific legal question concerning the lawfulness of detaching the Chagos Archipelago from colonial Mauritius prior to independence. That was a decolonisation question situated within a defined colonial administrative framework. It was not a universal adjudication of every conceivable sovereign claim touching the archipelago, nor did it extinguish competing historical claims simply because a politically convenient narrative wished it to. Yet the advisory opinion has repeatedly been inflated into something much broader than its actual legal scope, often by commentators and policymakers who should understand its jurisdictional limits. If anti-colonial doctrine is to be treated seriously rather than theatrically, then consistency requires more than endorsing outcomes that align with immediate strategic preferences. It requires acknowledging that excluded stakeholders, unresolved third-party interests, and structural documentary defects cannot simply be erased because they complicate a preferred geopolitical storyline. This is precisely where India’s anti-colonial posture begins to resemble convenience rather than principle.

The Postcolonial Successor State Question

Beneath India’s anti-colonial self-image lies a more uncomfortable historical question, one that deserves examination rather than reflexive dismissal. Did post-independence India fully dismantle imperial governance structures, or did it inherit and nationalise them? This is not a rhetorical accusation, but a legitimate analytical inquiry. Modern India emerged through the transfer of British imperial authority, inheriting extensive territorial, administrative, military, and institutional structures created under colonial rule. The orthodox legal narrative describes this as anti-colonial liberation and sovereign state formation, and within formal international law that position remains broadly accepted. Yet legal acceptance does not extinguish analytical questions about structural continuity.

The British Raj governed through cartographic consolidation, frontier exceptionalism, indirect rule, treaty hierarchies, strategic buffers, and differentiated sovereignty. Post-independence India inherited much of that architecture. In some respects, it transformed those structures democratically within a constitutional framework. In others, critics argue that imperial governance logic survived, merely transferred from colonial to national management. This question becomes particularly sharp in frontier and peripheral regions, where the relationship between central authority and local political legitimacy has often remained contested.

Nagaland remains among the clearest examples of unresolved postcolonial tensions, where political assertions of distinct identity predated Indian independence and resistance emerged around contested incorporation. Kashmir, within its own separate and deeply complex historical context, remains internationally recognised as an unresolved political dispute of exceptional sensitivity. Other regions have experienced insurgency, militarisation, emergency governance frameworks, and exceptional legal arrangements that raise legitimate questions about centre-periphery legitimacy. None of this means India is simply a colonial state in the crude propagandistic sense. Serious geopolitical analysis demands greater precision than slogans. It does, however, make claims of uncomplicated anti-colonial moral exceptionalism considerably harder to sustain. A state that inherited significant imperial architecture while preserving exceptional frontier governance cannot reasonably expect its emancipatory self-description to remain beyond scrutiny.

Strategic Exceptionalism and Civilizational Entitlement

A second tension emerges in the ideological currents that increasingly shape Indian strategic imagination, particularly where civilisational identity begins to overlap with geopolitical entitlement. Not every invocation of civilisational memory is expansionist. States routinely draw upon historical continuity, civilisational symbolism, and cultural narratives to construct national identity. The difficulty arises when civilisational imagination begins to imply hierarchy.

Concepts associated with Akhand Bharat, whether interpreted literally by some or symbolically by others, have contributed to regional anxieties precisely because they suggest a political geography in which Indian primacy is assumed to be historically natural and neighbouring sovereignties appear somehow secondary within a broader civilisational frame. Even where such narratives are dismissed as symbolic, their strategic effects remain real. States do not evaluate only formal doctrine. They assess rhetoric, behavioural patterns, accumulated signals, and political imagination. Regional trust is shaped not merely by official statements, but by the strategic culture that informs them.

This dynamic is particularly visible in the Indian Ocean, where India frequently behaves less like an equal participant in a plural maritime region and more like a state operating from assumptions of supervisory entitlement. The language may be softened through references to partnership, neighbourhood stability, and cooperative security, but the underlying structural logic remains recognisable. Exceptionalism rarely declares itself openly. It is more often performed through assumptions of natural leadership.

The African Pivot: Partnership or Strategic Penetration?

It is within this broader context that India’s increasingly visible strategic push into Africa deserves closer scrutiny, particularly as policy commentary seeks to present this expansion as a uniquely emancipatory form of partnership. Recent strategic narratives describe India as an ideal development partner uniquely suited to assist Africa in navigating climate transition, digital transformation, institutional modernisation, and security threats. The language is carefully calibrated. It invokes partnership, mutual advancement, cooperation, and South-South solidarity. Beneath this polished vocabulary, however, lies a far more recognisable architecture of influence.

Security proposals involving joint training, intelligence-sharing, AI-enabled surveillance, and cybersecurity cooperation are not neutral instruments of goodwill. They are mechanisms of strategic embedding. Intelligence-sharing creates informational dependency. Institutional interoperability creates alignment. Surveillance infrastructure creates technological leverage. None of these instruments are inherently illegitimate. States have long used them as ordinary tools of influence. The issue is not their existence, but the manner in which they are framed. When strategic embedding is marketed as emancipatory partnership, policy language begins to resemble one of the oldest habits of power, namely the tendency to describe influence as benevolence.

The same logic applies to digital infrastructure. Whoever builds digital systems shapes standards, dependencies, governance norms, interoperability frameworks, and future pathways of strategic influence. Digital architecture is not merely technical infrastructure. It is geopolitical infrastructure. To frame such initiatives purely as inclusive technological cooperation is to suppress their strategic implications. Climate cooperation is similarly layered. Green industrialisation sounds unquestionably virtuous until one notices the emphasis on critical minerals, supply chain integration, industrial positioning, and manufacturing access. Resource geopolitics has not disappeared. It has simply adopted cleaner language. None of this requires Africa to reject partnership. It does require Africa to read strategic offers without sentimentality.

Knowledge Architecture and Narrative Power

Perhaps the most revealing dimension of this strategic agenda lies not in security or infrastructure, but in the deliberate emphasis on think tanks, universities, research networks, and knowledge partnerships. These are often presented as harmless instruments of intellectual exchange, yet serious geopolitical analysis recognises them as mechanisms of narrative construction and influence architecture. Ideas shape policy. Policy communities shape elite consensus. Narrative ecosystems shape legitimacy. Building institutional knowledge networks is therefore not merely an academic exercise. It is strategic infrastructure.

States that invest in policy ecosystems are not simply exchanging ideas in the spirit of intellectual cooperation. They are helping shape the architecture through which future decisions become thinkable, respectable, and politically normalised. This is sophisticated statecraft, and there is nothing inherently improper about that. What matters is intellectual honesty. If India seeks strategic influence through narrative ecosystems and knowledge networks, that ambition should be acknowledged openly rather than cloaked entirely in the moral language of solidarity.

The Intermediary Power Problem

A deeper contradiction shadows India’s African pivot, and it concerns India’s evolving relationship with broader hegemonic structures. India increasingly presents itself as an alternative to hegemonic power, yet much of its recent strategic trajectory suggests something closer to integration within existing hegemonic architectures rather than resistance to them. Indo-Pacific alignments, participation in the Quad, strategic defence convergence with Western powers, and alignment within regional balancing frameworks suggest not the construction of a genuinely emancipatory counter-order, but managed accommodation within broader geopolitical hierarchies.

This creates a serious credibility problem for India’s Global South branding. A state cannot indefinitely market itself as a decolonial strategic partner while simultaneously functioning as a stabilising node within Western strategic architectures without eventually inviting scrutiny. The issue is not that India engages Western powers. All states pursue strategic interests. The issue is that anti-hegemonic language is increasingly being deployed to legitimise behaviour that aligns remarkably comfortably with hegemonic structures. At some point, this begins to resemble subcontracted influence rather than independent solidarity.

Africa’s Strategic Agency

None of this analysis should imply African passivity, because doing so would merely reproduce the same paternalism this critique seeks to expose. Africa is not strategically vacant terrain awaiting stewardship, nor is it condemned to choose between declining empires and ambitious successors. African states possess agency, institutional mechanisms, strategic options, and increasingly diversified partnerships. The African Union exists. Regional structures exist. Gulf capital is present. Chinese infrastructure remains influential. Southeast Asian partnerships are available. Latin South cooperation remains possible. Indigenous digital futures can be imagined and built.

The most dangerous narrative in contemporary geopolitics is not overt domination, but the subtle suggestion that agency requires guidance from whichever external actor currently claims moral legitimacy. That proposition deserves rejection whether it arrives from old imperial centres or newer strategic claimants, because Africa does not require permission to define its own future.

Conclusion

India’s aspiration to expand its influence in Africa is neither surprising nor inherently objectionable. Rising powers seek strategic reach. That is the ordinary grammar of international politics. What deserves scrutiny is the attempt to present selective doctrine, strategic penetration, geopolitical ambition, and managed influence as uncomplicated anti-colonial virtue.

A state that invokes decolonisation selectively, inherits and preserves elements of imperial strategic logic, tolerates structural exclusion when geopolitically useful, and increasingly aligns with broader hegemonic architectures cannot reasonably expect its moral self-description to remain beyond examination. Africa is entitled to partnerships. What it is not required to accept is moral theatre masquerading as solidarity. The Global South does not need a replacement hierarchy fluent in the language of emancipation.

Decolonisation was never meant to change supervisors.