Editorial | Grasping India’s pivot

Photo caption: External Affairs Minister of India S. Jaishankar with Jamaican Foreign Minister Kamina Johnson Smith during a press meet, in Kingston. (@DrSJaishankar/ANI Video Grab) 

Last week’s visit to Jamaica by India’s external affairs minister, Dr S Jaishankar, should be read as more than diplomatic reflex – or a nicety to a now peripheral country of the Girmitiya, the colonies to which the British sent Indian workers after abolition of slavery.

Marking the 180th anniversary of the arrivals, and acknowledging the contribution of Indians to Jamaican culture and the island’s development, important. But the more significant aspect of Dr Jaishankar’s trip to the island, and his later swings through Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago, was New Delhi’s signal of continuing geopolitical pivot, and it’s now whole-of-the-Caribbean strategy, in the face of the uncertainties unleashed by Donald Trump’s disruption of the global order.  

In other words, India’s engagement with the region is expanding beyond the old primary focus on cultural relations with those states with proportions of ethnic Indians in their populations – to wit, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago and Suriname. About three per cent of Jamaica’s population is of Indian ethnicity.

 Individual states, as well as the regional integration, should embrace this prospect of deepened relationship with India as part of a strategic expansion of the Caribbean’s engagement with the Global South.

To be clear, India has always maintained good relations with the Caribbean, especially the English-speaking region, with which it shares a history of British colonialism and post-colonial membership of the Commonwealth.  Further, India was a founder of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the Group of 77, which, especially during the Cold War, articulated the political and economic concerns of developing countries that didn’t want to be locked into either camp.

In the post-Cold War period, as India’s grew and modernised (it is now the world’s sixth-largest economy, measured by nominal GDP, after the United States, China, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom) these relations, while not abandoned, appeared to be of significantly less importance to New Delhi. Increasingly, India sought to assert itself on the international stage as a regional power, and as a near equal to the global powerhouses.

In 2019, during Donald Trump’s first presidency, he hosted India prime minister, Narendra Modi, on a highly choreographed visit to the United States, that included a mega event at a Houston, Texas stadium, attended by 50,000 people, which highlighted the contributions of Indians and people of Indian descent to the US.  Both Mr Trump and Mr Modi addressed the event, emphasising the strong ties and strategic partnerships between their countries. Mr Modi reciprocated the following year when Mr Trump was royally feted on his visit to India.

Mr Modi has since made other visits to the United States, including one in 2024 to attend a summit, hosted by Joe Biden, of the Quad alliance, an Indo-Pacific security forum, involving Australia, India, Japan, and the United States. There was another last year, soon after the start of Mr Trump’s second presidency when they signed agreements for initiatives in defence, trade and investment and technology.

However, US-India relations are now more on simmer, rather than hot boil. It was not long after Mr Modi’s February 2025 visit that Mr Trump unilaterally imposed protectionist tariffs on global trading partners, including India, claiming that they had been unfair to the United States and demanding a fairer treatment. Since then India has been attempting to negotiate a trade agreement that would reduce the 25 per cent Mr Trump imposed on Indian exports, plus a 25 per cent penalty because India purchased sanctioned Russian oil.

Like other countries, India has been discombobulated by Mr Trump’s ripping up of the rule book that has guided international relations since the end of the Second World War, and the US president’s frequent policy flip-flops. 

Unsurprisingly, there is a clear sense that India, a founding member of the BRICS group, which is perceived as a potential challenger to America’s economic dominance, is seeking to widen its global partnerships. With the world’s largest population (1.46 billion) and with the fastest growing of the big economies, New Delhi is also seemingly intent on having a prominent place at the table for the shaping of any new international order.

This is important for the Caribbean and CARICOM, a grouping of small countries which have effectively lost the limited insulation enjoyed under the old order and are faced with a dominant power that has little empathy for their concerns. CARICOM, whose members represent 14 votes at the UN, and as a group, carry a significant voice in international fora, is potentially important to India. Indeed, most CARICOM countries already support India’s candidacy for a non-permanent seat on the UN’s Security Council for 2027-2028 and the community and India have many ideas in common on UN reform. India is also sympathetic to many of the region’s ideas, mostly articulated in the Bridgetown Initiative, for a makeover of the global financial architecture and increased climate financing.

Against this background, context, Dr Jaishankar’s foray in the region builds on the summit between Mr Modi and CARICOM leaders in margins of the UN general assembly in 2019, and their follow-up meeting in Guyana in 2024 when they pledged to “strengthen economic and commercial relations and cooperation”.  Mr Modi followed the Guyana summit with a state visit to Trinidad and Tobago last year. In between the summits, India’s then president, Ram Nath Kovind, visited Jamaica in 2022.

India’s advancing economy raises the prospects for Indian investment in the region. But as important is the possibilities for strategic geopolitical alignments between New Delhi and the Caribbean.