from Hakki Pikki in Sudan to investments following Beijing

The Kaver operation that New Delhi launched in recent days aims to return home to thousands of fellow citizens stranded in Khartoum after the outbreak of the conflict. Many are part of a tribe that is dedicated to selling medicinal herbs abroad. But investment in the continent, linked to India by thousands of years of trade and colonial past, has also grown in recent years.

Milan () – Earlier this week, India launched the Kaveri operation to evacuate its fellow citizens stranded in Sudan after the outbreak of hostilities between the Army chief General Abdel Fattah Burhan and General Mohammed Dagalo, commander of the RSF paramilitary group. The evacuation process began with the transfer of the first 500 Indians to the city of Port Sudan, some of whom have already landed in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) and will be repatriated to Bengaluru on a direct flight.

Before the conflict broke out, there were about 4,000 Indians in Sudan, of whom at least a few hundred belonged to the Hakki Pikki tribe, a tribal group from the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Many lived in Khartoum, but most resided in the city of Al-Fashir, the capital of North Darfur, 1,000 km from the capital, and had moved to Africa to sell their herbal medicinal products, which are in high demand especially in rural areas of the country, where there are few doctors.

It was thanks to their requests on social networks, in which they described the brutality of the armed confrontations, that the Indian government mobilized to carry out an evacuation. After a leader from the main opposition Congress tweeted a petition to ensure his safe return to India, External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar accused him of “doing politics”. Elections in Karnataka will be held next month.

According to the 2011 census, about 12,000 Hakki Pikki live in this southern Indian state, but orally transmitted stories tell that the tribe originates from the north-western regions of India. They are a nomadic, inbred group that traveled the country hunting birds (in Kannada, the Karnataka language, their name means just that: “bird hunters”). They had to abandon this activity in the 1970s, when it was banned by the Indian government. Marginalized in their country since the days of British colonialism, during which they were classified as “criminal tribes”, today almost all of them have passports and travel from South America to Southeast Asia to sell their natural products abroad, with which they propose to cure various problems, from abdominal pain to hair loss. Their trips can last a few weeks or several months: some they counted who earn between 2,000 and 3,000 rupees a day and then return to India, often to fill orders for shipments that keep arriving from other countries.

After sharing a colonial history, trade between the Indian subcontinent and Africa has gained momentum in recent years. Addressing the Ugandan parliament in 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had outlined what are now known as the “Kampala Principles”, a set of guidelines on India’s engagement with Africa, aimed at promoting economic growth and addressing problems. common issues such as terrorism and climate change. Between 2005 and 2015, the value of bilateral trade grew annually by around 35%, while 99% of all African investment in India comes from Mauritius, a small island in the Indian Ocean where more than 60% of the population He is of Indian origin. The island, after displacing Singapore, now serves as the nerve center of Indian investment, which -behind Beijing- has reached the figure of some 74,000 million dollars. According to External Affairs Minister Jaishankar, India-Africa bilateral trade “reached $89.5 billion in 2021-2022, up from $56 billion the year before,” an achievement made possible mainly by exports of pharmaceuticals. and refined oil.

China remains the main economic partner of the continent thanks to a bilateral trade that amounted to 254,000 million dollars in 2021, but India, for its part, can take advantage of a diaspora of 3 million individuals, of whom more than a third they are in South Africa, while after Mauritius the majority are in Réunion (220,000), Kenya (100,000), Tanzania (100,000) and Uganda (90,000). Their presence in Africa is linked to historical reasons and is always related to business.

As early as the 12th century, the Arab cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi claimed to have found remains of Indian settlements in Mozambique probably dating from the first millennium AD. During the 19th century, at least 32,000 Indians were transferred to the dark continent to work in the territories of the British colonies (often as railway builders), but once their contracts ended, at least 7,000 decided to stay: they occupied the new first colonial areas as traders and adopted the name “dukawalla”. After World War II, the number of Indians in the Great Lakes region had risen to 320,000, and some African states had placed restrictions on the influx of foreigners. It is estimated that between 80% and 90% of the trade routes in Kenya were under Indian control, while in Uganda they owned almost all the cotton gins. In 1972 the Ugandan Indians (also called “Wahindi” in Swahili), who then made up around 2% of the population, were expelled and their activities “Africanised”. It was not until a decade later that they were allowed to return, and many of them are once again running thriving businesses.

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