President Thabo Mbeki is paying his first state visit to India with perhaps the largest delegation of cabinet ministers ever to have accompanied a South African president abroad.

Twelve ministers will travel with him, underscoring both the depth and range of the long relationship between the ANC and India.

India is one of very few countries with which SA can be truly said to have a strategic partnership. Both are important players in their respective spheres of influence, Africa and South Asia.

And the ANC and India have deep emotional ties, going back to Mahatma Gandhi's campaign against racial discrimination in SA in the early 20th century.

Formal relations between India and SA began in 1993 on the eve of the first democratic elections in SA.

On January 25, 1995, former president Nelson Mandela made the first state visit to India and signed an agreement to form an Inter-governmental Joint Commission for Political, Trade, Economic, Cultural and Scientific and Technical Co-operation.

This commission has met five times since, deepening and broadening relations across the entire spectrum of possible state-to-state relations. Hence the presence with Mbeki on this trip of almost all the major cabinet ministers, some of whom will sign further agreements of co-operation in their specific fields - adding to the 17 already signed.

Among the most important developments is that the two countries are negotiating a free-trade area agreement which should be concluded next year.

On March 28, 1997, when Mandela visited India again, he and Indian Prime Minister Deve Gowda signed "the Red Fort Declaration on a Strategic Partnership".

The two nations agreed to collaborate in international bodies like the United Nations, the World Trade Organisation, and in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) of developing nations, of which India was a founder and leading member and which SA chaired from 1998 until 2003.

But the expected intimacy implied in the Red Fort Declaration was not immediately achieved. It was perhaps frustrated by sharp differences over the issue of proliferation of nuclear weapons and India's development of its own nuclear arsenal.

In 1995 and again in 2000, SA and India disagreed over the extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which legitimises only the nuclear weapons of the so-called P5 countries - the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.

India opposed the NPT as discriminatory, while SA argued it was better to retain a treaty which restricted the number of nuclear powers than to have no such treaty and allow the number of nuclear powers to proliferate indefinitely.

In 1998 at the NAM summit in Durban, the differences between SA and India over nuclear weapons became heated when SA insisted on India being chastised by the summit, along with its enemy Pakistan, for its development of nuclear weapons.

Mandela also angered India by taking a neutral stance on India's territorial dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir, which has provoked several clashes and which fuels their nuclear arms race.

That neutral stance resulted in the sales of some SA armaments to Pakistan to which India strongly objected, though SA insisted they were intended only for defensive purposes.

Possibly because of Mbeki's more pragmatic and geo-strategic stance, the nuclear issue has gradually faded since the NAM summit and SA has taken a less neutral, more pro-India stance in practice.

Sales of conventional armaments to Pakistan have been curtailed, but not those to India, according to defence industry sources. SA has sold artillery equipment to India and has been trying to negotiate sales of its renowned G5 and G6 big guns. India is also training some SA naval officers and the two sides have conducted joint military exercises.

And the Red Fort Declaration commitments to collaborate with each other and with Latin America to fight for a better deal for the South on the world stage have recently begun to take real shape.

They were taken another important step forward when SA, India and Brazil signed the Brasilia Declaration on June 6 this year. They agreed jointly to strive to ensure that globalisation benefits the developing world.

In particular, they agreed to fight protectionist trade policies being pursued by the developed world.

This tripartite alliance found concrete expression at the WTO ministerial meeting in Cancun, Mexico in September when Brazil, India and SA formed the nucleus of a group of 22 developing countries which created a negotiating bloc to fight the agricultural protectionism of the developed world.

India's High Commissioner to SA, Shiv Shankar Mukherjee, said this week that the importance of Mbeki's visit was not in the number of agreements signed or the number of days Mbeki would spend in India.

Instead, he said, "the visit is bound to give a fresh impulse, from the highest political levels, to our partnership, propelling it to a genuinely strategic plane".

With acknowledgements to Peter Fabricius and the Cape Times.