Photo caption: External Affairs Minister of India S. Jaishankar with Jamaican Foreign Minister Kamina Johnson Smith during a press meet, in Kingston. (@DrSJaishankar/ANI Video Grab)

Last week’s visit to Jamaica by India’s external affairs minister, Dr S Jaishankar, should be read as more than diplomatic reflex – or a nicety to a now peripheral country of the Girmitiya, the colonies to which the British sent Indian workers after abolition of slavery.

Marking the 180th anniversary of the arrivals, and acknowledging the contribution of Indians to Jamaican culture and the island’s development, important. But the more significant aspect of Dr Jaishankar’s trip to the island, and his later swings through Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago, was New Delhi’s signal of continuing geopolitical pivot, and it’s now whole-of-the-Caribbean strategy, in the face of the uncertainties unleashed by Donald Trump’s disruption of the global order.