The Conundrum of Entanglement: India’s Participation in UN Peacekeeping Missions in the Congo

Using an historical approach, the contribution aims at exploring reasons and consequences of the Indian involvement in UN peace-keeping missions in the Congo. Against the backdrop of important transformations in the way of conceiving the relations with African countries over the last fifty years, how has the Indian participation in the various UN missions in the Congo affected the bilateral relation with the DRC and Indian-African relations at large? What kind of agenda shaped Indian presence and how has it been tuned over time? Do the new economic and political imperatives influence present Indian and Congolese attitudes in the framework of a very peculiar (and often criticized) multilateral cooperation? These are some of the issues addressed in order to shed light on a specific dimension of India's involvement in the Congo. The historical perspective helps to mark continuity and change in a complex engagement often depicted either in rhetorical terms or exclusively through the power politics lens.