The postponement of the Fourth India–Africa Forum Summit (IAFS-IV), prompted by the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, is a pause in diplomacy, not in strategic necessity. The Western Indian Ocean does not observe summit schedules. India's trade routes, energy supplies, and long-term security interests are bound up with Africa's littoral geography in ways that make sustained engagement not a diplomatic courtesy but an operational imperative. The relationship has too long been shaped by a donor-recipient vocabulary, India the provider, Africa the beneficiary. That framing was always analytically incomplete. It is now strategically dangerous.
Consider what the past two years have revealed. Houthi attacks on more than 130 vessels since late 2023 reduced Suez Canal traffic by over half, drove per-container shipping costs from roughly $ 1,660 to nearly $ 6,000, and forced a 420% surge in rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope. In April 2026, Iran threatened simultaneous closure of the Bab el-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz, which together carry over a quarter of global oil and gas supply. Indian inter-ministerial groups are already coordinating disruption responses for cargo routes through the Gulf.
The threat is not confined to chokepoints on maps. The Al-Shabaab and Houthi networks are now sharing weaponised drones, anti-ship missiles, and training infrastructure, an operational convergence designed to extend maritime disruption southward from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden and the broader Western Indian Ocean. In May 2026, the National Investigation Agency charge-sheeted conspirators in an ISIS-affiliated bioterrorism plot directed by Pakistan-based handlers, a case that underlines a strategic reality too often compartmentalised. The arc of jihadist destabilisation running from the Horn of Africa through the Arabian Peninsula to India's doorstep is a single theatre, not a set of isolated crises.
The instability in the African subcontinent is also an extended India security problem, whether or not it is acknowledged as such.
{{/usCountry}}The instability in the African subcontinent is also an extended India security problem, whether or not it is acknowledged as such.
{{/usCountry}}India's SAGAR doctrine (Security and Growth for All in the Region) and its 2025 successor, MAHASAGAR (Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions), have articulated the aspiration of India as a net security provider in the Indian Ocean. That aspiration cannot be fulfilled unilaterally. India needs African partner States, whose sovereign jurisdiction extends over the ports, exclusive economic zones, and coastal surveillance infrastructure of the Western Indian Ocean. They act as active co-architects of regional security, not passive beneficiaries of Indian maritime patrols. The infrastructure for this co-security relationship exists and is growing. India's Information Fusion Centre – Indian Ocean Region (IFC-IOR) at Gurugram has built 76 linkages across 28 countries and concluded an MoU with Seychelles' Regional Coordination Operations Centre to institutionalise real-time maritime domain awareness in the Western Indian Ocean. The inaugural Africa India Key Maritime Engagement (AIKEYME 2025), co-hosted by India and Tanzania with participation from 11 nations including Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, and South Africa, included combined anti-piracy command-post exercises, visit-board-search-and-seizure drills, helicopter operations, and search and rescue coordination. It is the model of co-security in practice. It must become a permanent platform, not a one-off exercise.
India's defence industrial transformation has created a new dimension to the partnership that was simply not available a decade ago. In FY 2025–26, India's defence exports reached a record ₹38,424 crore, a 63% surge, with private sector firms accounting for 45% of that total. This is a mature industrial ecosystem, not a government pipeline.
The implications for Africa are concrete. ideaForge Technology, India's leading indigenous drone manufacturer with over 725,000 logged operational flight hours, is actively expanding into African and West Asian markets. Zen Technologies, a specialist in AI-enabled counter-drone systems and electronic warfare simulators, has designated Africa as a primary export growth geography for the second half of FY26. The Africa Centre for Strategic Studies has independently documented the growing deployment of drone and AI-enabled systems in the Western Indian Ocean for persistent EEZ monitoring, a capability India's private sector is well-positioned to supply, co-deploy, and eventually co-produce with African partners.
On forward access, India's strategic reticence in the Horn of Africa stands in sharp contrast to the presence of the US, France, China, and Japan, all of which maintain permanent installations in Djibouti and are positioned directly at the Bab el-Mandeb. India's logistics exchange agreements with Quad partners, LEMOA, ACSA, and MLSA, also provide a proven legal template. Comparable arrangements with select East African and Horn of Africa States are not a diplomatic luxury; they are a structural gap in India's maritime posture that must be closed.
The security partnership and the economic partnership are not separable. Africa holds approximately 30% of global critical mineral reserves, including cobalt, lithium, manganese, nickel and copper. These are essential to India's energy and electric vehicle transition. India's National Critical Mineral Mission, backed by ₹343 billion over seven years, is already on the ground in Zambia. India's pharmaceutical exports, exceeding $ 25 billion globally, are growing fastest in African markets, with Nigeria alone contributing 14.3% of incremental growth in April–December FY 2025–26. Six African nations have adopted India's Digital Public Infrastructure stack. These are not aid flows. They are the foundations of a structural economic interdependence in which the security of supply chains, energy corridors, and digital infrastructure matters to both sides equally. The long-term weight of this relationship is further anchored in demography. Africa's working-age population will grow from 883 million in 2024 to 1.6 billion by 2050, constituting roughly a quarter of the global working-age total. Bloomberg projects one billion additional people entering the sub-Saharan labour force by the end of the century. That workforce, productively employed through India–Africa skills, technology, and manufacturing partnerships, represents a shared prosperity dividend. Left unconnected to stable economic structures and in fragile States, ungoverned littorals, and maritime corridors subject to the instabilities described above, it represents a security dividend for the adversaries of order.
The IAFS-IV will be rescheduled. When it meets, its security agenda should deliver five concrete commitments: A Western Indian Ocean Security and Connectivity Framework anchored in MAHASAGAR and aligned with the African Union's AIMS 2050 maritime strategy; permanent institutionalisation of AIKEYME as a multilateral maritime platform; a Critical Minerals and Clean Energy Partnership Agreement; an India–Africa Digital and Cyber Security Compact covering port resilience, subsea cables, and digital infrastructure; and logistics access negotiations with Horn of Africa and East African partners.
Until then, bilateral defence technology outreach, IFC-IOR expansion, private sector co-production conversations, and intelligence coordination must continue without pause. As external affairs minister S Jaishankar noted at the IAFS-IV launch, the India–Africa partnership is intended to be "a message of stability in a turbulent world, of reliability in an uncertain one." That message has to be built, ship by ship, agreement by agreement, across the most consequential stretch of ocean in the world.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Shrestha Medhi, doctoral candidate, African Studies, University of Delhi.