History has also planted the seedlings of a literary connection. When I published my first novel, The Great Indian Novel, in the United States, the then UN secretary-general, Peru’s Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, told me how enamoured he was of Indian literature and poetry as a young man, especially the work of Tagore, evocatively translated by Argentina’s legendary Victoria Ocampo, Tagore’s special friend. Tagore and Ocampo, it is said, inspired each other to write beautifully, leaving behind a poetic legacy that is part of the Indo-Latin heritage. The legacy was broadened by the work of Octavio Paz, whose service as Mexico’s ambassador in India witnessed the flowering of profoundly evocative poetry and prose about the land he saw around him. His books The Monkey Grammarian and his valedictory In Light of India are both testaments to a sophisticated affair with India that may yet animate a new generation of Latin American intellectuals. Tagore’s appeal lingers, but more contemporary Indian writers, some of whom have been translated into Spanish, have not made a comparable impact. On the other hand the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez has seeped into the sensibilities of many Indian readers, including in translation into Malayalam, making him one of Kerala’s most beloved novelists.
There are other affinities: a Gujarati businessman in Medellin runs a Mahatma Gandhi Foundation, which is devoted to propagating Gandhian teachings, in that violence-prone city. Che Guevara’s two-week visit to India in 1957, during the course of which he met Nehru and wrote to him to offer Cuban aid in the Kashmir earthquake that year, is fondly remembered, even though no aid was actually sought or received. The most popular ‘telenovela’ in Brazil in the first decade of the twenty-first century was a soap opera set in India, with Brazilian actors portraying Indian characters. These are all cultural connections waiting to be developed and built upon, which could one day give people-to-people contact more depth and meaning.
Another area with huge potential for growth is information technology. In Latin America as elsewhere, India’s IT and IT-enabled services industry has played a significant role in expanding India’s presence. Latin America clearly welcomes this and is looking to greater Indian involvement in these areas, including some significant technology transfers. As Indian IT companies establish themselves in the LAC, hire locals, train them in Indian ways and expose them to the opportunities generated by providing IT-enabled services in a globalized world, this sector is likely to be seen increasingly as India’s unique contribution to the development and prosperity of the region. On another note, when I was in Peru, the mayor of Lima had a one-point agenda for my meeting: he wanted me to persuade the Tatas to open a Nano factory in Lima. (I took the message back to India but failed. Perhaps Tata’s priorities might yet change in the years to come.)
The recent growth of trade and investment ties between India and Latin America has also encouraged much closer diplomatic relations. Today, LAC countries have nineteen diplomatic missions in New Delhi, while India has fourteen missions in the LAC region, both representing significant increases from twelve and seven, respectively, in 2002. In 2010 India opened a new embassy in Guatemala to cover Central America, but pending invitations from countries like El Salvador and the Dominican Republic to do the same have been deferred solely because of a lack of human resources in India to staff new establishments adequately. Inadequate attention to Spanish-language training in the Indian Foreign Service has also given New Delhi far too few diplomats ready, equipped and inclined to interact with Latin America in the language with which it is most comfortable.
Spanish is, of course, not a factor in the noticeable warming in the bilateral relationship between India and (Portuguese-speaking) Brazil, each of which is the largest economy and most populous country in its region. The two countries have already expanded the scope of their bilateral dialogue to go well beyond trade issues alone, and there are hints that defence and security cooperation are also on the anvil. The former Brazilian president Lula de Silva visited India three times during his eight years in office, more than any other head of state. The creation of IBSA, referred to earlier, came out of the Brasília Declaration of 2003, which launched the India — Brazil — South Africa Dialogue Forum to promote enhanced trilateral cooperation on issues such as trade, investment, education, poverty reduction and the environment. All this did not, however, prevent the two countries from disagreeing with each other during the fraught WTO negotiations in 2008. South — South cooperation is all very well, but national interests must inevitably prevail.
As in Africa, comparisons with China are inevitable. The extraordinary increase in China’s trade with Latin America is the greatest bilateral spurt in any trade relationship in the world — an astonishing nineteenfold rise over the past decade, to a staggering $150 billion in 2010. That figure dwarfs India’s $20 billion, but it also gives rise to some disquiet in the LAC countries, which fear dependence on Chinese manufactured goods and the extractive (some would say exploitative) nature of China’s interest in the region, which (again unlike India’s) is largely government led and not private-sector driven. As to investment, as The Economist noted a few years ago, Chinese FDI in Latin America ‘has hitherto amounted to less than meets the eye’. That Indian companies have begun to make significant investments is welcomed by many who are hoping to see the South Asian country balance China’s impressive presence in the LAC, but it would again be idle to see the two in competition — not least because the two systems are different and India is never likely to match the Chinese government’s single-minded strategic drive abroad.
And yet the narrative of the last decade is sufficiently impressive to augur well for a significantly transformed relationship. The time has clearly come to look beyond the relatively modest figures for India — LAC trade (a little over $20 billion in 2010) or of Indian investments in the region (some $12 billion) to the direction of current and future trends. The current occasional (and relatively infrequent) visits of policy-makers have to be augmented in both directions, and the success of the handful of existing trade agreements needs to be built upon with systematic efforts to conclude similar agreements with more countries. It is time to take India — LAC ties to the next stage: institutionalizing regular contacts (from foreign office consultations to state visits), signing new trade agreements, offering more incentives to both the public and the private sectors, and putting more energy and vision into trade and investment promotion (for instance, offering governmental support to small and medium enterprises from one region to explore market access in the other). High-level policy dialogues on improving relations should not merely take place but, as Heine suggests, become part of the regular agenda of governments on both sides.
The India — LAC relationship could be the most interesting example of the transformation of the underdeveloped concept of South — South cooperation — from the rhetorical days when both regions advocated the statist concept of a new international economic order and clamoured for more resource transfers from the developed world to an era in which the indigenous private sectors of both have become powerhouses driving their growth and prosperity. In India, where rhetorical genuflections to socialism have persisted stubbornly for longer than in Latin America, the pursuit of the unexplored potential of the region should and will transform the Forgotten Continent into the Continent of Opportunity. That requires a vision and energy that I believe to be incipient but in need of encouragement from the highest levels in New Delhi.