The Growing South Asian-African Trading Interconnectedness: An Economic Battle for New Delhi and Islamabad

Abstract

The emerging great power politics in the African region has raised the significance of African countries in contemporary world politics and forced the leaders of different states to start paying substantial attention to the African continent. Akin to a few other states, the South Asian nations, mainly India and Pakistan, have started formulating various cooperative connections with leading African countries while emphasising their untapped economic potential in the world. It has led the African states to augment their ongoing trading collaborations with the outside world. In South Asia, New Delhi and Islamabad have started activating their cooperative economic interactions with the key African players while revising their conventional patterns of Africa centric foreign policies. In the debate of rising bilateral collaborations between African and South Asian nations, the Look African Policy Initiative of Islamabad cannot be ignored. The government of Pakistan preferred to concentrate on the African region to develop multifaceted economic collaborations with the leading African economies. Contrasting Pakistan’s African policy, the Indian leadership under different political administrations structured a multi-layered New Delhi policy for the African nations. The India-Africa Forum Summit has been treated internationally as the leading initiative describing the multidimensional economic potential of Africa in Indian geo economic calculations. In this way, the increasing trading ties of both South Asian rival nations with Africa have created a South Asian African trading interconnectedness that could not be spared from India-Pakistan economic competition in regional and extra-regional affairs. Indian mainstream security architectures always preferred to undermine the position of Pakistan in the extra-regional affairs where African Muslim nations are the present target of New Delhi. In this way, this paper is an academic endeavour to analyse the emerging cooperative ties of Islamabad and New Delhi with the leading African nations while emphasising the spill-over effects of their competition on Africa