Cooperação Brasil-Índia: dinâmicas e perspectivas

Edgard Leite (org.)

Programa de Estudos Indianos

Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro

Copyright © 2014 Edgard Leite (org.)

REVISÃO Patrícia Mota Freitas

CAPA E PROJETO GRÁFICO Carolina Camargo

FOTO DE CAPA Mitul Kajaria

PRODUÇÃO EDITORIAL Patrícia Barbedo

DADOS INTERNACIONAIS PARA CATALOGAÇÃO NA PUBLICAÇÃO (CIP)

C776 Cooperação Brasil-Índia: dinâmicas e perspectivas / Edgard

Leite, organizador. – Rio de Janeiro: Verve, 2014.104 p. ; 21 cm.

ISBN 978-85-66031-80-5Programa de estudos indianos, Universidade do Estado do

Rio de Janeiro.

1. Relações Internacionais. I. Leite, Edgard . II. Título. CDD- 327

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Brazil-India Relations through the Lens of Political Economy

Adriana Erthal Abdenur*

With the deep structural changes that have taken place within the international system with the end of the Cold War, new opportunities have emerged for developing countries located in distant parts of the world to cooperate and coordinate positions. This change is due not only to technological advances in communications and transport that can help stakeholders to overcome great distances, but also because of the relative flexibility of the post-US hegemonic era, as compared with the Cold War, permits more fluid political alignments. In addition, the partial decentering of the world economy has entailed the emergence of new hubs of economic growth outside of the old metropolis. The extent to which multipolarity has set in is still open to debate, but the decentering process has opened up new pathways and possibilities for South-South cooperation.

Links between Brazil and India have deepened against this backdrop of deep structural change and growing uncertainty in the international arena. How has the changing world economy enabled and constrained ties between these two places, and to what extent have Brazil and India used their expanding maneuver space in the international arena to consolidate their ties? Adopting a political economy perspective, I analyze Brazil-India relations across time, from the colonial period through the post-Cold War era, so as to understand the varying degree of agency which these entities have enjoyed in relating to each other. While there was episodic interaction and some direct cooperation between the two countries until the end of the Cold War, these flows were restrained by underdevelopment as

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well as by the low degree of autonomy of Brazil and India as political entities. Brazil-India ties began to deepen and diversify significantly only after the turn of the millennium, when the changing international system allowed for new modes of trans-continental cooperation to gear at lessening development dependency.

The aim of the paper is not to provide a comprehensive account of Brazil-India relations — a task that would fall outside the scope of this brief paper — but rather to paint in broad strokes some of the key inflection points in Brazil and India’s capacity for direct interaction. The remainder of the paper thus traces their interaction historically, from colonial trade and contraband to current bilateral relations as well as involvement in international organizations, both established institutions such as the United Nations and Bretton Woods Institutions and looser coalitions like IBSA, BASIC, and BRICS.

POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SOUTH-SOUTH COOPERATION

The changing world system has linked different places across time through changing relations of power, including the creation of dependency of the periphery upon the core, often mediated by a semi-periphery (Wallerstein 1976, Santos 2000). By adopting a political economy perspective, relations between seemingly unrelated events, processes, and places can be discerned (Harvey 1993). However, political economy studies have tended to focus heavily on core-periphery relations, rather than on links between nodes outside the core. Within this scheme, Brazil and India may be viewed as having long occupied semi-peripheral positions within the modern world system — first as colonies, and later as large, regionally influential developing countries with reasonably diversified economies. Although most literature within IPE has

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focused on how peripheries and semi-peripheries relate to the core — that is, North-South relations — the past decade has brought about a significant surge in ties between these semi-peripheries. The world system, far from static, has entailed changes both in terms of the location of the core - as cycles of accumulaton wax and wane - and with respect to the positions of peripheries and semi-peripheries, as demonstrated by the rise of the Asian Tigers (Amsden 2001). More recently, the economic growth experienced by China, incuding its procurement abroad of natural resources, has prompted new questions about the changing role of non-core economies, as well as the deepening ties among developing countries (Arrighi 2010, Mohan 2013). In turn, this restructuring calls for a new historiography of South-South relations.

In the case of Brazil and India, it is necessary to understand why and how these two states have significantly deepened their ties over the past decade. This surge in cooperation can be explained through internal factors, such as their respective foreign policies, but also with reference to the changing configuration of the global economy. Contemporary Brazil and India both aspire to open up new opportunities and increase their influence abroad, both within and beyond their respective vicinities. As the tenth economy by nominal GDP (and third largest by purchasing power parity), the second most populous state and the most populous democracy, India has considerable influence within and outside its immediate vicinity. In addition, India has significant hard power — including nuclear weapons — and soft power that is enhanced by the widespread Indian diaspora. However, constraints include inefficient production, persistent social tensions, and significant regional contestation (Ganguly 2012).

On the one hand, like India, Brazil is a large, complex democracy which, despite having limited hard power, possesses abundant natural

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resources and has accumulated considerable soft power through its extensive South-South development cooperation. In addition, Brazil has the somewhat unusual credential of nearly 140 years of peace with neighboring countries. On the other hand, it features some of the world’s highest crime rates, including homicide, low levels of technological innovation, and lagging education and other public services. Although Brazil does not face rivalry from nuclear power neighbors, its regional leadership is contested by Argentina, Venezuela, and Chile, among others. Like India, it faces persistent poverty and sharp socioeconomic inequalities despite recent advances along both these fronts.

Despite their considerable differences in historical trajectory, socioeconomic development models, cultural makeup, and political dynamics, both Brazil and India have each sought to forge more independent foreign policies vis-à-vis the advanced economies of the global core. Over the past decade, this search for greater autonomy has included significant efforts to enhance their respective South-South cooperation with other developing countries, namely through strategic partnerships with other rising powers. Brazil and India have also faced significant contestation by neighboring states, and thus generate tensions when they claim to represent their respective regions. However, this contestation has not prevented these countries from banding together through loose groupings such as IBSA and the BRICS, both of which lend greater weight to their calls for reform of the global governance architecture. These similarities and points of interaction provide the analytical basis for examining Brazil-India ties across time.

INTRA-COLONIAL TRADE BETWEEN GOA AND BAHIA

Links between the territories now known as Brazil and India date back to the colonial era, when exchanges between these places were

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mediated through, and limited by Portugal’s mercantilist logic. The first known links began with the “great expeditions” undertaken by explorers either hailing from Portugal or sponsored by the Portuguese crown—voyages undertaken as part of the competitive urge to build vast networks of overseas colonies from which to extract wealth for the core and create exclusive markets. Even early on, the territories that would become Brazil and India were interlinked in the Portuguese imaginary of far-flung places. In 1500, Pedro Álvares Cabral, who carried out the first significant explorations of the northeastern coast of South America and claimed much of this territory for Portugal, was assigned by King Manuel I to lead an expedition to India meant to open up new spice trade routes by setting up an entrepot in Calicut. The letter written by the scribe Pero Vaz de Caminha describing the lands and people Cabral’s fleet encountered in South America mentions Calicut (present-day Kozhikode)17:

For all that, the best fruit that could be gathered hence would be, it would seem, the salvation of these people. That should be the chief seed for Your Majesty to scatter here. It would be enough reason, even if this were only a stopping place on the voyage to Calicut.

Departing from Brazil in 1500 with a fleet of thirteen ships, Cabral crossed the South Atlantic and followed the route to India that Vasco da Gama had opened up by circumnavigating the Cape of Good Hope and sailed (Greenlee 1995). Cabral’s fleet, stocked with foodstuffs from the South American coast, successfully traded for spices in Cochin, thus

17. Letter from Pero Vaz de Caminha to Dom Manuel I, 1 May 1500. Author’s translation.

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carrying out the first recorded gesture of trade between Brazil and India.Over the next three centuries, these far-flung territories were

tenuously linked through Portuguese colonial rule, with direct links severely restricted by the mercantilist restrictions imposed upon inter-colonial trade. Portugal established the Estado da Índia (State of India), first based out of Cochin (present-day Kochi) and, after 1510, out of Goa, which became in essence the capital of Portugal’s Asian domain. Portugal also had several trade outposts elsewhere in India, including island enclaves in Daman and Diu, and it carried out commercial exchanges between these nodes and colonies elsewhere, as far as Brazil. All of these territories, as well as those in between, were collectively referred to as “Indies,” although the crown drew a distinction between Oriental and Occidental Indies.

Over the next centuries, Brazil became a stopover for the flow of ships established by Portugal to maintain control of its distant colonies. Through this commerce, products such as porcelain and spices, textiles, gems, and crafts were brought from India to Brazil, mostly entering through the port of Salvador. Several species of plants, including mango, breadfruit, and bamboo, were also transported from Asia via India, and some of these were successfully introduced (Lapa 1982). In the opposite direction, Brazilian products taken to India included tobacco, drief beef, and shipping ropes. As Muhana (2003) notes, the limited historiography of inter-colonial trade makes it difficult to ascertain the true extent of these flows, since exchanges between Brazil and Goa were frequently carried out as contraband.

Some individuals also traveled between these places, particularly Goa and Bahia, which played somewhat equivalent roles in the Portuguese mercantilist system as distant commercial hubs and funneling points for the extraction of wealth (Pimentel

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2013). In addition to the navigators and soldiers conducting intra-colonial trade, a small number of Brazilian bureaucrats and private entrepreneurs served in Portuguese India during the colonial period. Vasco Fernandes Coutinho, for instance, the donatário (owner and administrator) of the Espirito Santo captaincy in Brazil, had previously served in India, and Duarte Coelho, the first captain general of Pernambuco, had twice been sent by the Crown to India. In 1700, Maria Úrsula d’Abreu e Lencastro, a woman from a prominent Rio de Janeiro family, joined the Portuguese army in disguise and was sent to fight in India under the false name Baltasar do Couto Cardoso18.

In addition, on several occasions the Portuguese crown — noting similar climates in Goa and Brazil — dispatched agricultural experts to work on projects elsewhere in its colonies. In 1690, for instance, two Goans traveled to Brazil to assist with the plantation of cinnamon and pepper, both brought from India. In 1751, more Goans voyaged to Brazil as part of the Naubande expedition, to help with the planting of palm trees as part of an ultimately unsuccessful project to produce palm liqueurs in Brazil. According to National Library documents, two of the Goans died in Brazil, and the others returned to India in 175319.

Despite these documented exchanges, the flow of goods, people, and ideas between Brazil and India was restricted not only by great geographic distances, but also by the lack of autonomy of those territories within the colonial system. Even after Brazil was granted independence, in 1822, its incipient foreign policy was tightly linked

18. Ministério da Fazenda (n.d.) “Relações Brasil-Índia” Brasília. Online: http://www.receita.fazenda.gov.br/Memoria/administracao/curiosidades/RelacoesBrasilIndia.asp 19. Inventário dos Documentos Relativos ao Brasil Existentes no Arquivo de Marinha e Ultramar de Lisboa, organizado por Eduardo de Castro e Almeida, 1:10, 12, 17 e 46.

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to that of Europe and later the United States, leaving limited room for interaction with colonies until the second half of the 20th century20. On the whole, therefore, direct exchanges between Brazil and India during this period were episodic, informal, and both mediated and restricted by the European metropolis.

BRAZIL AND INDIA DURING THE COLD WAR

It was only with the sharpening competition between the economic models promoted by the United States and the Soviet Union that Brazil and India, as sovereign states yet operating within the rigid configurations of the Cold War, began to interact more directly. Diplomatic ties between the two countries were first established in 1948, shortly after India’s independence and the traumatic events of the Partition. Although Brazil had been granted its own independence peacefully more than a century earlier, the two countries found themselves in similar positions in the post-War period. Economically, both remained, in part due to the lingering effects of colonialism, highly dependent on the advanced economies; Brazil had been an exporter of primary commodities since it first became a colony, and India had been transformed under British rule from a major exporter of processed goods, primarily textiles, into an importer of manufactures and exporter of primary materials. Politically, Brazil and India were also relegated to secondary status in the war’s aftermath. Although they had each supported Allied efforts in combat, both left out of the core group of countries that shaped the era’s international system,

20. One notable exception was the importation of Indian zebu cattle to Brazil. Starting in 1898, over 6,200 head of zebu cattle of Indian origin were imported by Minas Gerais cattleman Teófilo de Godoy. Around 80% of Brazil’s present cattle stock descend from those zebu. Source: Museu do Zebu, Parque Fernando Machado, Uberaba.

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including the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions. Roosevelt promised Brazil a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, but the proposal was vetoed by the Soviet Union and the UK. As for India, although in 1942 it was among the original members of the United Nations as one of only four non-independent founders,21 it too was denied a permanent seat.

Early Brazil-India relations were marked by differences over the Indian independence movement, especially with respect to Goa. After 1947, Portugal refused to give in to India’s request for it to relinquish control of its Indian enclaves. Just as Brazil formally supported Portugal’s continued control over the latter’s African colonies, it opposed Indian claims over Portugal’s enclaves until 1961, when it realized that the decline of Portugal would allow India to assume control of Goa by force. After the Indian army overwhelmed Portuguese resistance and assumed control of Goa and the other Portuguese enclaves, Brazil criticized India for violating international law (Stuenkel 2010). Brazil’s stance led to sharp disappointment by the Indian government, which — as a strong supporter of independence movements elsewhere in the developing world — had expected greater solidarity from a fellow former colony (Furtado 2010).

The two countries’ positions with respect to the Cold War camps had both overlaps and divergences. On the one hand, Brazil’s democratic government attempted to pursue a more independent path in its foreign policy in the early 1960s, but the course was reversed after 1964, when a coup d’état installed a military regime that lasted for twenty-one years. This meant that, although Brazil often expressed solidarity with other developing countries (and, eventually, newly independent states), it was not a full member of the Non-

21. The other non-sovereign founding members were Belarus, the Phillipines, and Ukraine.

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Aligned Movement, sending only observers. The Indian government, on the other hand pursued a Socialist orientation, with implications both in the political arena and in the economic sphere. Although officially India kept itself outside the East-West divide, it was among the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement. In addition, the Indian government enjoyed military and ideological support from the Soviet Union. Moscow vetoed a UNSC resolution against India’s annexation of Goa, and it provided military assistance seen by Indian policy elites as particularly valuable given India’s border disputes with Pakistan and China.

It was not until the 1970s that, under pressure caused by the oil crisis, Brazil began to seriously consider South-South cooperation as a serious complement or alternative to its ties to the North. As a result, unlike India — a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement—Brazil contributed to South-South coordination primarily through the Group of 77 (G-77) and the struggle for a more just economic system through UNCTAD (Machado 2004).

These multilateral platforms meant that Brazil and India — both of which placed considerable importance on multilateralism, especially via the United Nations — interacted on issues of global governance, but that this interaction was also rather dispersed through the broad coalitions. At times their positions on UN issues coincided, but convergences were seldom a result of bilateral coordination.

There were also divergences in their development models that sometimes led to differing positions with respect to the international trade regime. On the one hand, from colonial times, Brazil’s economy has always depended heavily on the export of commodities, and its sharp inequalities in land tenure led to the formation of vast farms geared towards export-oriented monoculture. As a result, Brazil developed a keen interest in promoting free trade in agricultural

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products. India’s agriculture, on the other hand, has been based on millions of small farms that produce crops mostly for domestic consumption, for which the Indian government has provided subsidies. Thus, Brazil and India’s positions on trade have not always coincided, especially on the issue of agricultural trade.

A visit by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1968 was well received by Brazilians but did little to increase concrete exchanges between the two countries. In addition to their diverging economic models, there were considerable political differences. Economically, India’s goal of attaining near-autarky meant that it had limited interest in international trade and investment. In the meantime, Brazil’s right-wing regime used import substitution to nurture industrialization, and it avoided becoming too close to leftist governments. The closed nature of their economies helps to explain why trade and investment between the two countries was minimal during the Cold War, never breaking the $200 million mark.

One area in which exchanges did occur was in science and engineering, with a number of Indian specialists collaborating with Brazilian counterparts on nuclear, space, and metallurgical research projects in Brazil. However, as Tripathy (2012) notes, this cooperation withered after India conducted its 1974 nuclear bomb test and Brazil caved in to US pressure to stop collaborating with Indian specialists. Nuclear weapons would continue to be a point of difference between the two states. India continued to resist the UN’s non proliferation agenda as discriminatory against developing countries. In contrast, although Brazil and Argentina engaged in a brief and limited nuclear arms race, their differences were eventually resolved peacefully, with both states voluntarily giving up their respective nuclear weapons programs.

Even though their direct policy coordination was limited, both Brazil and India became active members within certain

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debates at the UN, working to redress the imbalances of the system by drawing on active multilateralism. India was particularly active in the struggle against colonialism and apartheid; it was the first country to raise the issue of Apartheid at the United Nations. Like Brazil, it also worked towards redressing unfairness in global trade negotiations, although their strategies for redressing this imbalance did not always converge, in part due to different economic interests. Both Brazil and India played key roles in negotiating developing country positions on GATT, for instance opposing the inclusion of services within the agreement22. Within the security sphere, during the negotiations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Brazil and India opposed what they perceived as the regime’s discriminatory stance towards developing countries. In general, however, the overarching ideological consideration of the Cold War and the continued dependence of the semi-periphery upon the core imposed significant constraints on South-South cooperation, both in terms of political alignments and with respect to economic exchanges.

BRAZIL AND INDIA IN THE POST-COLD WAR ERA

With the collapse of the end of the Cold War, both Brazil and India found themselves at first on uncertain footing. Brazil had experienced a burst economic growth during the late 1960s and early 1970s—the period known as the “Brazilian Miracle” years—but the oil shock of 1973 helped fuel high indebtedness, soaring inflation, and economic stagnation during the 1980s. The strengthened Bretton Woods institutions, called in to prevent further crisis, imposed new limits on Brazil’s autonomy. As a result, even as Brazil returned to

22. Guerreiro, Ramiro S (1985) “Depoimento” Rio de Janeiro: CPDOC, p 432.

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democracy in the final decade of the Cold War, its policy elites were primarily concerned with achieving macroeconomic stability and meeting the requirements of structural adjustments, even as poverty persisted and inequalities sharpened.

As for India, with the collapse of the Soviet Union it lost an important source of ideological and defense support. Like Brazil, India shifted gears economically, carrying out some reforms to partially liberalize the economy in the 1990s. Both countries also began to deepen ties to other important regional powers. In 1996, Fernando Henrique Cardoso became the first Brazilian head-of-state to visit India. In addition to this active presidential diplomacy, two factors facilitated the deepening of ties between the two countries. First, as part of the 1980s wave of globalization, major multinational companies began relocating low and medium technology manufacturing from relatively high-waged countries in the West and the Asian Tigers to lower wage countries in Asia, including India. Second, the dramatic growth of China’s economy, and the increasing internationalization of its own companies elsewhere in the developing world, showed that South-South cooperation could be about more than ideological solidarity.

However, the search for new economic opportunities intersected with political considerations, including occasional divergences. After India’s May 1998 nuclear tests, Brazil aligned with a group of non-nuclear states, both developing and advanced, to demand an end to the nuclear activities carried out by India and Pakistan (who had followed up by conducting tests of its own) and to call for compliance with the objectives of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (Patti 2010). Despite such disagreements, after the turn of the millennium, both Brazil and India began to pursue South-South cooperation more consistently. This strategy entailed not only offering more

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development cooperation to smaller countries within and beyond their vicinities, but also strengthening relations with other large developing countries, especially those that were vocal in calling for reform of global governance.

When Workers Party candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was inaugurated as Brazil’s president, in 2003, South-South cooperation became even more salient within Brazilian foreign policy23. India — along with China, Russia, and South Africa — was cited within his inaugural speech among the new government’s priority partnerships. Head of state visits in both directions followed, as well as frequent high-level exchanges meant to reinforce bilateral agreements signed in cooperation areas including oil and gas, tourism, infrastructure, academic exchanges, and biotechnology (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2013).

Relations between Brazil and India have also expanded through their participation in loose coalitions created to coordinate positions and strategies among rising powers. Some of these, such as the G-20, bring together developing and advanced countries, whereas others prioritize strengthening ties among rising powers. Through the India Brazil South Africa Dialogue Forum (IBSA), founded in 2006, the member states have cooperated in areas such as science and technology, education, agriculture, health, and naval defense. The IBSA Fund for Alleviation of Poverty and Hunger has included funding for development projects in East Timor, Burundi, Vietnam, and Guinea-Bissau, among others24. Despite nearly annual meetings since 2006, in 2013 the initiative appeared to lose steam with the cancellation of that year’s summit, although the three heads

23. Presidência (2003) Discurso de posse, 1o mandato. Brasília, 1 January 2003.24. UNDP (n.d.) “IBSA Fund: Overview of Development Impact” Online: http://tcdc2.undp.org/ibsa/

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of state, plus those of Russia and China, did continue the cycle of BRICS meetings.

The BRICS, originally launched as the BRIC initiative but later expanded via the 2010 inclusion of South Africa, has magnified Brazil and India’s demands for changes in global governance. However, due to the presence of two authoritarian regimes, within the BRICS the democratic identity of Brazil and India, along with that of South Africa, tends to be dampened, as reflected in the grouping’s agenda — which, despite having broadened over the years to include more areas of potential coordination, leaves aside issues of internal democracy and human rights. In addition, the grouping’s strong discourse of respect for national sovereignty has led to greater alignment between Brazil and India within international debates about military interventionism, although there are differences in their stances: Brazil has openly expressed distaste for NATO’s expanded mandate, while India — which collaborates with the United States in anti-terrorism and anti-piracy efforts and has enjoyed some US backing for its nuclear power status — has maintained a more ambiguous relation with the US and NATO on international security issues. In development-related debates, while Brazil and India continue to butt heads on agricultural trade issues, they have found increasingly common ground on issues of intellectual property rights, especially as they pertain to the production of generic medications for diseases representing public health risks.

Finally, despite China and Russia’s stated support for reform of the UN Security Council, to which both Brazil and India continue to aspire, the BRICS have been unable to find a common strategy for overhauling the organization. As a result, Brazil and India have cooperated more concretely on this issue outside of the BRICS. Namely, they have joined forces with Germany and Japan through the G-4, a loose coalition bringing together four states that aspire to a permanent seat at the UN

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Security Council and that support each other’s positions, even as their bids are contested by their respective regional rivals.

The flexibility of these coalitions has also permitted India and Brazil to band together on specific topics through different permutations of rising powers. For instance, since late 2008 the BASIC bloc (Brazil, South Africa, India, and China) has attempted to coordinate positions in climate change negotiations, at least in the sense of achieving a lowest common denominator position. Pooling their leverage, the four countries committed to act jointly at the Copenhagen climate summit, including the possibility of collectively walking out of the negotiations if their minimum requests went unmet.

These interactions and greater political dialogue have helped to boost bilateral flows between Brazil and India. Bilateral trade reached USD$10.62 billion in 2012. India’s top exports to Brazil are diesel fuel, coal and other minerals, electrical equipment, cotton and yarns, and medicines, while Brazil’s exports to India include minerals and agricultural commodities, in addition to machine parts, airplanes, and gemstones. Although India and Mercosur signed a framework agreement in June 2003, with a preferential trade agreement entering into force in June 2009, it has produced only modest results so far25, and there are ongoing efforts to boost these flows, including through potential triangulation via IBSA and the South African Customs Union (SACU). A bilateral commission and chambers of commerce also work to boost exchanges between the two countries, including investments26. At the same time, the flow of goods and capital is

25. http://www.cni.org.br/portal/data/pages/FF808081314EB36201314F22625A7F72.htm 26. Brazilian companies have invested in automobiles, IT, mining, energy, biofuels, footwear sectors in India, while Indian companies have invested in such sectors as IT, Pharmaceutical, Energy, agri-business, mining, engineering/auto sectors. Indian firms investing in Brazil include software firm Wipro Technologies, which has set up a business process outsourcing centre in Curitiba to provide shared services to AmBev, the largest brewery in Latin America.

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accompanied by a gradual increase in mutual cultural exposure and intellectual exchanges, including through increased collaboration among Brazilian and Indian academics, think tanks, NGOs, universities. This interaction is limited due to the small size of Indian diaspora communities in Brazil and vice versa, but the internet and government policies such as scholarships for study abroad provide more direct linkages between Brazilian and Indian populations.

CONCLUSION

The roles and positions occupied by Brazil and India within the world economy have changed across time, and with systemic transformations their agency — including in terms of relating to one another as semi-peripheries located on opposite sides of the planet — has also varied. During the colonial period, direct ties were mediated by the global core, especially via the Portuguese network of colonies and former colonies. During the Cold War, Brazil and India, as two formally sovereign states, found more opportunities to interact politically as well as economically, but these exchanges were limited by their underdevelopment and by the East-West divide, even as both countries sought a degree of autonomy vis-à-vis the two camps. It was only with the end of the Cold War, and specifically with the decline of US hegemony, that Brazil and India have found greater space for, and interest in, direct cooperation. This deepening interaction has taken place both through bilateral means and via multilateral platforms, and it has diversified across the political, economic, and cultural dimensions.

However, the degree of agency that these states possess in pursuing South-South cooperation, including with each other, should not be overstated. Their links face limitations not only because of their

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persistent domestic challenges — compounded, over the past few years, significantly slowdown in both economie s— but also by their regional priorities and by the external resistance that both continue to encounter in their efforts to become global players. In addition, surging South-South cooperation between Brazil and India takes place within a context of increasing competition among rising powers, particularly with the dramatic rise of China, whose overtures in Latin America —including Brazil — have expanded significantly over the past decade. Overcoming these hurdles so as to enhance Brazil-India cooperation will entail not only greater political willingness on both sides, but also deeper knowledge of the constraints and opportunities generated by the changing world economy.

*Instituto de Relações Internacionais, PUC-Rio / BRICS Policy Center

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