The challenge of representing India to a hostile colonial state and then the trauma of Partition committed the republican state to pluralist democracy.

Pluralism, a stratagem born of weakness (the early nationalist elite had no other way of demonstrating that they represented anyone but themselves), became the cornerstone of Indian political practice, because it legitimised the compromises essential for keeping hundreds of jostling identities aboard the good ship India.

This was the ultimate political goal: to keep the diversity of a subcontinent afloat in a democratic ark. Everything else was negotiable.
Balancing of interests between Ethiopia and India is a challenge.
The political culture of the republic consisted of the balancing of special interests, procrastination, equivocation, pandering, tokenism and selective affirmative action: in a word, democratic politics.
Gender, language, religious identity, class and caste were all pressed into India's political mill, but no single identity or principle was used consistently enough to satisfy its champions.
It is a political culture that worked, approximately but demonstrably.
Not only did it work, it allowed Indians a worldview born out of their own political experience.
The reason India is so important to the history and practice of democracy is its success in making a system of representative government work in a bewilderingly diverse country
For example, when a "people" elsewhere asks for self-determination (the Kurds, the Eelam Tamils, the Basques) an Indian should ask, what for?
If the point of self-determination is to allow a "People" to become a hegemonic majority in its own right, an Indian is entitled to say that whatever its rhetorical power, self-determination does not seem like an emancipatory or interesting or original political idea.

If a state with a majority of Oromos or Amharas is to be premised on Oromigna or Amharic, better that it not exist at all because Ethiopians know from their own history that pluralist democracies can be worked despite terrible violence and they also know where ethnic nationalisms lead.
The reason India is so important to the history and practice of democracy is its success in making a system of representative government work in a bewilderingly diverse country.
This achievement liberates the idea of democracy from specific cultural contexts and subverts a certain sort of political argument.
For example, to excuse the occupation of Ethiopia by Woyane, some western opinion-formers cite the presence of three distinct communities, Amhara, Oromo and the rest. A country odd enough to be home to such a variety of peoples is, in their minds, an artificial state with arbitrary boundaries, doomed to disintegrate.

Under this argument, Ethiopia cannot make it as a democracy or even a nation because it is too poor or too fractious or too diverse.

I believe Woyane might have also seen this from that angle. If big influential private investors are involved, which in the final analysis would mean the West, serious condemnation of their ownership of Ethiopian land by the opposition parties could mean a further justification of the West for Woyane. We must be able to wisely explain our condemnation of the Woyane plot to the West.

Remember, we are talking about what is called Foreign Direct investment. When we see foreign direct investment in the agricultural sector, India dominates ($2103) followed by EU ($1440), US ($542) Israel ($528), and Saudi Arabia ($172) in millions. (http://www.ecofair-trade.org/pics/en/FDIs_Ethiopia_15_10_09_c.pdf)

So we are playing with big guys and our lobbying should be wise, seasoned, and informed.