India and the Global South

The Concept of the Global South

The term Global South refers broadly to the nations of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania that share common histories of colonialism, economic marginalisation, and structural dependence on the industrialised world. It is not a purely geographical designation since Australia and New Zealand lie physically in the southern hemisphere yet belong to the Global North in political and economic terms, while India and China lie north of the equator yet are counted among the Global South. The concept is better understood as an ideological and political category, denoting countries that continue to face developmental deficits rooted in the colonial and imperial past and that seek a more equitable international order.

The term gained currency in the 1980s through the Brandt Commission report, which popularised the North-South distinction as a way of describing the structural divide between wealthy industrialised nations and poorer developing ones. The Brandt Line, a rough cartographic division separating the prosperous North from the developing South, became a shorthand for this global inequality. Over time, the term Global South gradually replaced earlier formulations such as the Third World and developing countries, partly because those earlier terms carried Cold War connotations or implied a hierarchy of civilisational development that the newer terminology sought to avoid. Today the Global South encompasses a diverse range of countries at very different levels of income and development, but united by shared concerns about fair representation in global institutions, access to finance and technology, climate justice, and the reform of a world economic order whose rules were largely written by the industrialised North.

Historical Roots: Bandung, NAM, and Third World Solidarity

India's engagement with the Global South has deep historical roots that predate independence and became a defining feature of Nehru's foreign policy vision. The foundational moment for postcolonial solidarity was the Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia in April 1955, where representatives of 29 Asian and African nations gathered to affirm principles of mutual respect, non-interference, anti-colonialism, and cooperation among newly decolonised states. The Bandung Conference gave institutional expression to what came to be called Afro-Asian solidarity and established the normative framework within which India understood its relationship with the developing world. Nehru was among the most prominent voices at Bandung, bringing to it the philosophical commitments of non-alignment and peaceful coexistence that had been central to India's foreign policy since independence.

The Non-Aligned Movement, formally established at the Belgrade Conference in 1961 with Nehru, Nasser, and Tito as its principal architects, built directly on the Bandung spirit. NAM sought to carve out an independent political space for developing nations that refused to subordinate their foreign policies to either the American or the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. India under Nehru used NAM as a platform to articulate the interests of newly independent states, to advocate for decolonisation across Africa and Asia, and to press for a more democratic international order in which the voices of smaller and poorer nations carried genuine weight. The movement gave developing countries collective bargaining power in the United Nations and other international forums that they would have lacked as isolated individual states.

During the 1970s the political solidarity expressed through NAM was supplemented by a sustained economic challenge to the existing international order through the demand for a New International Economic Order. The NIEO emerged from the 1973 NAM summit in Algiers, where developing countries gave expression to their frustration that formal political decolonisation had not translated into economic sovereignty or genuine development. The structure of the global economy, with its terms of trade systematically favouring manufactured exports from the North over primary commodity exports from the South, its intellectual property regimes that restricted technology transfer, and its international financial institutions that attached intrusive conditions to development lending, was experienced as a form of economic neo-colonialism. The NIEO declaration, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1974, called for sovereign equality of states, the right of nations to control their natural resources, improved terms of trade for developing country exports, greater access to technology, reform of the international monetary system, and increased development assistance. India played an active role in pushing this agenda, both through NAM and through the Group of 77, the coalition of developing countries formed in 1964 at the first UNCTAD conference to negotiate collectively on trade and development issues.

The NIEO project ultimately failed to achieve its ambitious structural goals. The debt crisis of the 1980s, which forced many developing countries into painful adjustment programmes under IMF and World Bank conditionality, marked the decisive shift toward the Washington Consensus, a neoliberal development paradigm that gave primacy to market liberalisation, privatisation, and fiscal austerity. The collapse of the NIEO agenda did not eliminate the underlying grievances of developing countries but did scatter the political coalition that had articulated those grievances, as individual states pursued their own adjustment paths rather than maintaining collective solidarity.

India's Position within the Global South

India occupies a distinctive and in some respects paradoxical position within the Global South. It is simultaneously a developing country with hundreds of millions of people living in poverty and a rising power with the world's fifth largest economy, a space programme, nuclear weapons, and growing global influence. This dual identity gives India's relationship with the Global South a particular character: India speaks as a member of the developing world, sharing its historical experience of colonialism and its contemporary experience of structural disadvantage in the global economy, while also increasingly acting as a provider of development assistance, technical cooperation, and political leadership to smaller and less powerful developing nations.

India's engagement with the Global South has been shaped by several consistent philosophical commitments. The principle of South-South cooperation, rooted in the idea that developing countries should assist one another through sharing knowledge, technology, and experience on terms of equality and mutual benefit rather than the donor-recipient hierarchy that characterises North-South aid, has been central to Indian foreign policy. India has explicitly distinguished its approach to development cooperation from Western aid, emphasising that it offers partnership rather than charity, respects the sovereignty and development priorities of recipient countries, and does not attach political conditions to its assistance. This approach is grounded in the philosophical principle of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, the ancient Indian idea that the entire world is one family, which Modi governments have repeatedly invoked to frame India's global development engagement.

The strategic dimension of India's Global South engagement is also significant. As India's economy has grown and its ambitions in global governance have expanded, cultivating the support of developing countries has become increasingly important for achieving India's objectives in multilateral forums. A large bloc of developing country votes in the United Nations General Assembly, support for India's bid for a permanent seat on the Security Council, backing for Indian candidates in international organisations, and coalition support in negotiations over trade, climate, and finance all depend on India maintaining credibility as a genuine champion of Global South interests rather than merely invoking that identity rhetorically while pursuing its own national interests.

Multilateral Platforms and Institutional Engagement

India has engaged with the Global South through a wide range of multilateral platforms and institutional frameworks. The Group of 77 remains the primary negotiating coalition of developing countries within the United Nations system, and India has been an active participant in its deliberations on trade, development finance, climate change, and global governance reform. India has used G77 platforms to advocate for the reform of international financial institutions including the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to give developing countries greater voting weight commensurate with their economic size and their share of the global population.

BRICS, the grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa that was formalised as a summit-level forum in 2009 and expanded in 2024 to include Iran, the UAE, Egypt, Ethiopia, and others, has become an important platform for advancing Global South interests in international economic governance. Through BRICS, India has supported demands for reform of the Bretton Woods institutions, contributed to the establishment of the New Development Bank as an alternative source of development finance operating without the political conditionalities attached to IMF lending, and engaged in discussion of alternatives to dollar dominance in international transactions. India's position within BRICS is nuanced: it has been among the more cautious members on questions of confrontation with Western institutions, preferring reform from within to the creation of a rival architecture, and it has resisted the drift of some BRICS members toward an explicitly anti-Western posture.

The IBSA Dialogue Forum, established in 2003 through the Brasilia Declaration and bringing together India, Brazil, and South Africa as three large, multiracial democracies from three different continents, represents a distinct strand of Global South engagement that emphasises the compatibility of democratic governance and development. IBSA was created in the context of disappointment with developed countries' failure to implement the development agenda agreed at the Doha Round of WTO negotiations and was intended to demonstrate that the most advanced democracies of the Global South could coordinate on issues of global governance reform, trade, and development. China sought inclusion in IBSA, proposing a CHIBSA format, but India succeeded in keeping IBSA as a specifically democratic platform, distinguishing it from BRICS in which China plays a central role. IBSA summits have addressed issues including WTO reform, climate change, food security, and United Nations reform, and an IBSA Fund for the Alleviation of Poverty and Hunger has supported development projects in other Global South countries.

India has also engaged the Global South through region-specific diplomatic initiatives. The India-Africa Forum Summit, held in 2008, 2011, and 2015, established a framework for comprehensive engagement with African nations across areas including development assistance, trade and investment, capacity building, and political consultation. India has extended lines of credit amounting to billions of dollars for infrastructure and development projects across Africa and has positioned itself as a partner in Africa's development that offers an alternative to both traditional Western donors and Chinese investment, emphasising the importance of technology transfer and capacity building alongside capital. The Forum for India-Pacific Islands Cooperation, established in 2014, has deepened India's ties with small island developing states in the Pacific, addressing their particular vulnerabilities to climate change and sea level rise. The India-CARICOM Summit has similarly extended India's engagement to Caribbean nations. These structured regional forums give concrete institutional expression to India's claim to speak for the Global South and provide mechanisms for sustained political dialogue and development cooperation.

South-South Cooperation: Instruments and Mechanisms

India's South-South cooperation is delivered through a range of instruments that reflect its comparative advantages as a middle-income country with significant technical expertise and experience of development under resource constraints. The Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation programme, established in 1964, is the flagship mechanism for India's technical assistance to developing countries. ITEC provides training and capacity building to personnel from developing countries across a wide range of fields including agriculture, information technology, public administration, healthcare, English language training, and small and medium enterprise development. Over the decades since its establishment ITEC has provided training to tens of thousands of professionals from more than 160 countries, building human capital and interpersonal networks that have strengthened India's relationships across the Global South.

India has extended concessional lines of credit to developing countries for infrastructure and development projects, particularly in Africa and in India's immediate neighbourhood. These credits are tied to the use of Indian companies and materials, which has attracted some criticism from recipient countries who prefer untied assistance, but they have financed significant infrastructure including roads, railways, power generation, and telecommunications across the developing world. India has also provided grant assistance for development projects, offered debt relief in specific cases, and supplied medicines and vaccines to developing countries at preferential prices, most notably during the COVID-19 pandemic when India supplied vaccines to more than 90 countries under the Vaccine Maitri initiative before domestic vaccine shortages necessitated a temporary halt to exports.

India's digital public infrastructure has emerged as a potentially transformative contribution to Global South development in recent years. India's experience building the Aadhaar biometric identity system, the UPI real-time payment platform, and the CoWIN vaccine management system at scale and at very low cost per user has generated considerable interest among developing countries seeking to leapfrog conventional infrastructure and establish digital foundations for financial inclusion, social protection delivery, and public service provision. India has actively shared its digital infrastructure experience and is working to establish the India Stack as a global model for developing country digital transformation. The International Solar Alliance, founded by India and France in 2015 and headquartered in Gurugram, mobilises finance and technology for solar energy deployment across developing countries and represents another area in which India's technological experience is positioned as a resource for the Global South.

Voice of the Global South Summit and G20 Presidency

India's assumption of the G20 presidency in December 2022 provided an unprecedented platform for articulating and advancing Global South interests within the premier forum for international economic governance. The G20 had historically been dominated by the perspectives and priorities of its wealthy member economies, and developing countries outside the G20 had limited channels through which to influence its agenda. Prime Minister Modi gave early and emphatic expression to the ambition of using India's presidency to reorient the G20 toward Global South concerns by organising the first Voice of the Global South Summit just days after India assumed the presidency, in January 2023.

The Voice of the Global South Summit brought together leaders and senior officials from more than 100 developing countries across ten thematic sessions addressing issues including food and energy security, climate change and development, digital transformation, inclusive growth, and reform of international institutions. India channelled the inputs from this consultative process into G20 deliberations, positioning itself as an aggregator of Global South perspectives rather than simply a national voice. A second Voice of the Global South Summit was held later in 2023 and a third in 2024, establishing it as a recurring diplomatic platform. The most concrete institutional achievement of India's G20 presidency was securing the permanent membership of the African Union in the G20, a reform that had been sought by African nations for years and that significantly strengthened the formal representation of the continent that comprises more than a quarter of the world's nations in the premier global economic governance forum.

India's G20 presidency theme of One Earth, One Family, One Future drew explicitly on Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam to frame a vision of inclusive globalisation that addressed the concerns of the most vulnerable countries alongside those of the largest economies. India used the presidency to advance discussions on debt restructuring for heavily indebted developing countries, reform of multilateral development banks to increase their lending capacity on more favourable terms, digital public infrastructure as a development tool, and climate finance obligations of developed countries toward the developing world.

India, the Global South, and Multipolarity

India's engagement with the Global South is inseparable from its broader foreign policy commitment to a multipolar world order in which power is distributed across multiple centres rather than concentrated in a single hegemon or dominated by a narrow group of Western states. India's strategic autonomy doctrine, the insistence on preserving freedom of manoeuvre and avoiding alignment with any single power bloc, resonates with the historical NAM commitment to independence from great power pressures and gives India credibility as a genuine representative of Global South interests rather than a proxy for any particular major power.

The relationship between India's Global South leadership and its competition with China within that space is one of the defining tensions in contemporary Indian foreign policy. China is also a major actor in the Global South through its Belt and Road Initiative, its massive infrastructure financing across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and its leadership of multilateral institutions including the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the New Development Bank. India and China compete for influence across the developing world, and India's emphasis on democratic governance, transparency, and the terms of its development partnerships is partly designed to differentiate its offer from Chinese infrastructure financing, which has attracted criticism for generating unsustainable debt burdens and for employing primarily Chinese workers and materials rather than building local capacity.

India's claim to speak for the Global South faces genuine tensions and challenges. As India's economy grows and its strategic interests converge in certain areas with those of the industrialised world, maintaining credibility as a champion of developing country interests becomes more demanding. India's climate positions, which have sought to protect the developmental rights of a country that still has hundreds of millions of people without reliable access to electricity while resisting targets that would lock in energy poverty, reflect a genuine Global South perspective but have sometimes put India at odds with the most vulnerable developing countries, particularly small island states facing existential threats from sea level rise. India's insistence on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities in climate negotiations, which demands that developed countries bear primary responsibility for emissions reduction given their historical contribution to cumulative greenhouse gas concentrations, has been a consistent and important articulation of the Global South position in international climate politics.

Challenges and Critiques

The concept of the Global South, and India's claim to leadership within it, face several substantive critiques. The Global South is an extraordinarily diverse category that encompasses oil-rich Gulf states, large emerging economies like Brazil and Indonesia, least developed countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and small island developing states in the Pacific, grouping together countries whose economic interests and political priorities often diverge considerably. The solidarity implied by the term may obscure more than it reveals about the actual distribution of interests and power within this heterogeneous grouping.

India's position as both a member and a claimant to leadership of the Global South creates inherent contradictions. India's economic growth, its nuclear weapons, its space programme, and its aspiration to permanent membership of the UN Security Council all mark it as a rising power whose interests do not straightforwardly coincide with those of the smaller and poorer countries it claims to represent. Critics observe that India's development assistance is relatively modest compared to its economic size and that its trade policies do not always favour the interests of other developing countries. The temporary suspension of vaccine exports during the second wave of COVID-19 in India in 2021, however understandable in domestic political terms, damaged the credibility of the Vaccine Maitri initiative and highlighted the limits of solidarity when it comes into tension with domestic imperatives.

The revival of Global South solidarity through platforms like BRICS and VOGSS is also constrained by the fundamental diversity of interests within the grouping and by the China factor. India's difficult relationship with China, marked by border disputes and strategic competition, makes genuine coordination within BRICS increasingly complicated. The expansion of BRICS to include countries like Iran and Russia creates tensions with India's other foreign policy relationships and risks associating the Global South platform more broadly with anti-Western positions that India does not fully share. India's preferred approach is to advocate for reform of existing international institutions rather than their replacement, and to build a more genuinely multipolar order in which developing countries exercise greater influence within reformed global governance frameworks rather than constructing a wholly separate architecture.