New Delhi, Oct. 27: Just before 1 am in Brasilia today, re-elected President Dilma Rousseff received one of her first congratulatory messages from a leader outside Latin America.

The two tweets from Prime Minister Narendra Modi were crisp and short, their content unremarkable.

“Congratulations to @dilmabr (Rousseff’s Twitter account) on her re-election as the President of Brazil. My best wishes to her for the second term” Modi tweeted. “I look forward to continuing to work with @dilmabr to strengthen India-Brazil relations in the years to come.”

But Modi’s promptness in wishing Rousseff — his first official act this morning, officials said — betrayed the relief that today ran through India’s diplomatic establishment after days of unease over the prospect of her defeat in yesterday’s presidential run-off.

India has traditionally enjoyed warm relations with Brazil, but it is under Rousseff and her fellow Left-leaning predecessor, popularly known as Lula, that Latin America’s largest economy has emerged one of New Delhi’s most critical international partners. 

Rousseff’s run-off rival Aecio Neves had indicated a return to his country’s traditional inclination towards the Bretton Woods financial institutions that Brazil and India have together been challenging, triggering concern in New Delhi, senior officials here confirmed to The Telegraph.  

“We’ve invested a lot in giving a direction to our relationship with Brazil that has enabled us to take on traditional economic superpowers as key emerging economies,” an Indian official said. “What happens in Brazil is for that country to decide, but we’re glad we will not have to rethink our strategy.”

Lula, President of Brazil from 2002 to 2010, is credited with conceptualizing two groupings -- the India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) trilateral and the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) – that have together grown into a key cornerstone of India’s foreign policy.

“Brics (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa) in its current form is envisaged as an economic group,” Krishnendra Meena, Jawaharlal Nehru University assistant professor who specialises on the grouping, told The Telegraph.

“But in many international forums, the Brics countries have spoken together as a group, as a voice of the developing world and as a counter organisation to the West.”

Modi has enthusiastically embraced the Brics grouping since taking over as Prime Minister this May, and in July, attended a summit with Rousseff, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin and South African President Jacob Zuma in Fortaleza, Brazil.

The New Development Bank, a name coined by Modi for a financial institution BRICS leaders inaugurated at that summit in July, is aimed as an alternative to Bretton Woods institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund that are dominated by the developed West.

India and Brazil have also collaborated closely in other crucial groupings. The G-4 that also includes Japan and Germany is seeking an expansion of the UN Security Council’s permanent membership, and the BASIC collective that also includes South Africa and China jointly lobbies on environment concerns of the developing world against the West’s prescriptions on emission cutbacks.

The collaborative efforts forged over the past decade appeared to be under threat over the past few days, officials said, as opinion polls in Brazil pointed to an increasingly close race between Rousseff and her run-off rival Aecio Neves.

Advisers of Neves, an economist from the centre-right Brazilian Social Democratic Party, have in recent weeks repeatedly questioned the country’s tilt away from its pre-Lula traditional alliance with Washington, and the government’s focus on South-South collaboration.  

That’s why Dilma’s re-election augers well for bilateral India-Brazil ties too, officials and experts said.

The bilateral trade between India and Brazil has swollen from under $1 billion in 2002 to nearly $10 billion annually in 2013 — making Brazil India’s largest trading partner in the Latin American region.

“The relationship between India and Brazil will become stronger. The continuing President is expected to carry forward the legacy,” Meena said.