Examine India and South-Africa co-operation through bilateral and multi-lateral forums.

The historical foundation is unusual and matters. Gandhi's twenty-one years in South Africa from 1893 shaped satyagraha before it reached India. India raised apartheid at the very first session of the United Nations General Assembly in 1946, was the first country to sever trade relations with the apartheid regime, and supported the African National Congress throughout. Relations were restored in 1993, and the Red Fort Declaration of 1997 established the strategic partnership.

Bilateral cooperation.

• Trade and investment. South Africa is among India's largest African trading partners, with Indian imports of gold, coal and minerals and exports of vehicles, pharmaceuticals and engineering goods. Indian firms have a substantial presence, and the Indian-origin community of over a million people is a standing link.
• Defence. Naval cooperation, the IBSAMAR trilateral exercise, and defence industrial contact.
• Health and technology. Generic medicines, and cooperation in space and information technology.

Multilateral cooperation, which is the stronger strand.

• IBSA — the India-Brazil-South Africa Dialogue Forum of 2003, three democracies of the South with a development fund of their own.
• BRICS, in which South Africa is the African anchor and which India supported expanding.
• The G-20, where India handed over to a South African presidency and both pressed the case for the African Union's inclusion and for debt relief.
• The WTO, where the two jointly proposed the TRIPS waiver on COVID-19 vaccines in 2020, the clearest instance of coordinated Southern leadership in recent years.
• The United Nations, through the G-4 and the L69 grouping on Security Council reform, and shared positions on climate finance and common but differentiated responsibilities.

Assessment. The multilateral partnership is genuinely productive; the bilateral one underperforms, with trade well below potential, no trade agreement, and limited connectivity. The relationship is strongest where the two act as spokesmen for the global South and weakest where it depends on commerce.