Lula’s India visit will elevate ties to deeper economic, strategic partnership: Expert (IANS Interview)

Washington, Feb 19 (IANS) Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s visit to India for the ongoing AI Impact Summit, followed by a full-fledged state visit, signals a deliberate attempt by the two largest democracies of the Global South to elevate ties beyond multilateral coordination and into a deeper economic and strategic partnership, a senior US-based economist working on India-Brazil ties has said.

“This Brazil visit is very significant,” said Dr Anit Mukherjee, Senior Fellow at ORF America, who is working on the India-Brazil relationship, told IANS on Wednesday (local time).

He noted that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had travelled to Rio de Janeiro last year for the BRICS summit, followed by a state visit.

Lula is accompanied by “14 other ministers of his cabinet, nearly half his cabinet and 150 business leaders”, Mukherjee said. That, he added, “is a signal that the Brazil-India relationship is not just about coordination and G20 or BRICS, but will move towards a more strengthened partnership in trade, in investment, in manufacturing, in services, and also in other spheres.”

Mukherjee said the relationship was not always robust. “I think the relationship between Brazil and India historically has not been very strong,” he said.

But he traced a turning point to the early 2000s. “When President Lula came to power in 2001, he had the vision of bringing together the three large developing countries, Brazil, India, and South Africa,” he said. That effort led to IBSA and later BRICS, laying “a strong foundation of trust in their relationship mostly through high-level exchanges.”

He argued that the two countries now have a broader economic agenda. “Brazil and India are the two largest democracies of the global south. They are growing economies. They have a large young population. They also have quite a lot of technical capacity,” he said.

He pointed to Brazil as “an agricultural powerhouse” and highlighted Embraer as “the third largest civilian plane manufacturer in the world”. On the Indian side, “Bajaj and Mahindra, two large Indian conglomerates… have opened factories in Brazil manufacturing motorcycles and tractors”, he said. Indian IT firms “like TCS and Infosys… have a relationship with the Brazilian market.”

“Digital public infrastructure is another emerging area. India has the Unified Payments Interface, which is the world’s largest instant payment system. Brazil has a very similar system built on digital public infrastructure called PIX,” Mukherjee said. Together, he said, the systems “are going to do about 1 billion transactions per day, which is nearly similar to what MasterCard and Visa do per day.”

On people-to-people ties, he said the Indian community in Brazil is “about 4,000 non-resident Indians who live there,” but “it is growing”. He also pointed to cultural links. “Yoga is very big in Brazil. So is Ayurveda,” he said.

India and Brazil are key members of BRICS and the G20, often coordinating positions on development finance, trade reform, and Global South priorities. Both have pushed for reform of multilateral institutions and a greater voice for emerging economies in global governance.

Trade between the two countries has expanded steadily over the past decade, spanning agriculture, energy, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, and information technology, even as both seek to diversify supply chains and deepen South-South cooperation amid shifting geopolitical alignments.

–IANS

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