Yearender 2025: India Positions Itself As Global South Voice Amid Global Realignments
In 2025, India expanded its Global South leadership through high-level diplomacy, development partnerships and multilateral agenda-setting.
Published : December 22, 2025 at 11:22 AM IST
New Delhi: As 2025 draws to a close, India’s diplomatic map reveals a year of sustained and purposeful engagement with the Global South.
From Africa and Latin America to Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, New Delhi stepped up political outreach, development cooperation and strategic partnerships, positioning itself as a key interlocutor for developing countries seeking alternatives in a shifting global order.
"The Global South is writing its own destiny," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said while addressing the Ethiopian parliament on December 17. "And, India and Ethiopia share a vision for it. Our vision is of a world where the Global South rises not against anyone, but for everyone."
Honoured to address the Ethiopian Parliament. Watch my speech. https://t.co/fxEZ7EAnFW
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) December 17, 2025
Earlier, during his meeting with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, Modi underlined that it was a singular honour for India to welcome the African Union (AU) as a G20 member during its presidency of the intergovernmental forum in 2023. Given that the headquarters of the AU are located in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, Modi’s state visit to Ethiopia in mid-December – his final foreign trip of the year – served as a symbolic capstone to India’s expanding Global South footprint.
Modi's 2025 itinerary reads like a roadmap of the Global South. In July, he embarked on a five-nation tour – Ghana, Trinidad & Tobago, Argentina, Brazil and Namibia – that combined first-ever bilateral visits, BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) Summit participation and parliamentary addresses aimed at raising India’s footprint in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. The government framed that tour as an explicit effort to “deepen Global South ties”.
In April, Modi visited Thailand for the BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) Summit to further regional cooperation in South and Southeast Asia and to formalise an upgraded strategic partnership with Thailand – a sign that India’s Global South outreach included neighbourhood diplomacy as well as trips to distant countries.
At the multilateral level, Modi represented India at the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Johannesburg in November – the first G20 Summit to take place in Africa – where India advanced a package of development and technology proposals meant to benefit emerging economies and middle-income countries. Modi’s Johannesburg interventions were widely seen as an attempt to steer global governance debates from a Global South perspective.
The pattern through 2025 was moves from ceremonial visits to specific deliverables: memorandums of understanding (MOUs) on training, joint centres (data, skills), trade and lines of credit, programmes for capacity building and scholarships. Across Africa and Latin America, India emphasised training for UN peacekeepers, healthcare cooperation, technological partnerships (satellite/open data), and people-to-people links (education, medical tourism), rather than solely large-scale hard infrastructure financed by external lenders. The Ethiopia trip is a case in point.
India mixed bilateral outreach with the use of multilateral platforms. At the G20 in Johannesburg, India pitched initiatives like health, skills, traditional knowledge, open satellite data and critical minerals cooperation designed to be useful for developing members and to project an Indian model of pragmatic, capacity-building cooperation rather than top-down prescriptions. That positioning – India as a credible agenda-shaper for developing and middle-income countries – strengthened its Global South leadership claim.
Participation in BRICS meetings, including Modi’s presence in Brazil for the BRICS summit, and closer ties with countries that are looking for alternatives to traditional Western finance and technology partners gave India influence in shaping South-South institutional options. India has combined this with selective integration into existing institutions like the G20 and the UN to straddle both worlds.
Security cooperation, like maritime and defence ties in Africa and the Indian Ocean, partnerships on critical minerals and technology cooperation, including open satellite data, Digital Public Infrastructure, and data centres, were recurring topics. These reflect India’s interest in supply-chain resilience and in building strategic partnerships that go beyond conventional aid or trade. A number of African countries discussed cooperation in counterterrorism and law enforcement alongside development topics.
Cultural outreach – parliamentary addresses, state banquets that exchange songs and cultural gestures, diaspora engagements – accompanied formal diplomacy. These softer interactions helped make bilateral visits more substantive and helped India deepen roots where Indian communities or medical and education ties already exist. Modi’s parliamentary addresses abroad continued to be used to articulate a narrative of shared civilisation, development and sovereignty.
To sum up, the year 2025 saw India move from being a prominent voice for the Global South to acting like an operational partner – combining summit-level meetings with a push for implementable projects and for agenda items that matter to developing countries like health, skills, open data, capacity building, and critical minerals.
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