Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor, speaking in New York, has injected what sounds like some solid good sense into how India’s connection with Africa is talked about. India’s engagement in Africa is not in any way a competition with China, he said, it is independent of that; indeed, he said “it is unconstructive to see any of these relationships in terms of a third country.” Any proper Africa policy for India would indeed be based on India’s own many interests in enhancing its connections to that continent, quite independent of China’s interests there. It is also certainly the case that choosing to either mimic China’s methods in Africa unaltered, or ignoring them completely, is not an option.

On the one hand, India retains much cultural capital in Africa that is simply unavailable to China. Whatever the other flaws of Nehruvian foreign policy, in a continent conditioned by its tragic history to be sensitive to exploitative relations, having a reputation for international contacts characterised by openness and equality is a good thing. China’s involvement in Africa intensifies yearly; but it has seen several missteps at various points, of a sort that are only likely to intensify any perceived difference in attitude between India and China.

On the other hand, ignoring the fact of China’s political engagement with Africa would be foolish. Not because of any attempt at competition, but because there is something India needs to learn from it. The big idea to take away is that China’s political leadership has correctly understood that Africa is a region sensitive to political contact. And the highest political leadership hammers that home relentlessly in regular official visits to African countries: Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit in February to five African countries meant he has made at least four trips since taking office in 2003, easily more than one every two years; Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has been a similarly frequent traveller. Many of those visits are not to Africa’s headline states, like Nigeria and South Africa (both visited recently by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh), but to smaller, often neglected African countries which value the visits correspondingly more. India as an idea cannot be represented to Africa merely by the corporations and individuals headquartered here that are there to do business. More is needed. In the years after Independence, India built up enviable soft power in Africa as a “good” power, with responsible, anti-colonial credentials. The mechanisms to maintain that, such as the non-aligned movement, have fallen into disrepair. The UPA government must prioritise the building of bilateral relationships that can serve the same function, for India’s sake, as well as Africa’s.