By Kul Bhushan, IANS
In the light of disturbances in Kenya, NRIs may well ponder over an African proverb, “When elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.” By and large, whenever there has been violence, Kenyan Indians have not been targeted directly, injured or killed except by accident or being on the fringes of action. However, when an angry crowd becomes a mob, the shops owned by Indians – or anyone else for that matter – get broken into and looted. This happens in any part of the world – not just Kenya. The latest rioting in Kenya is no exception.
In the general election, the incumbent President Mwai Kibaki, from the majority Kikuyu tribe, was opposed by Raila Odinga from the second largest Luo tribe. After a close race, Kibaki was declared the winner and Odinga said the top post had been ‘stolen’ from him. So his fellow Luos went on the rampage in the provincial town of Kisumu. Shops owned by Indians were damaged in Kisumu but not in the capital Nairobi. When the opposition called for a rally in the Uhuru (freedom) Park in the city centre, the crowds were stopped on the fringes and thus shops were spared.
Ever since Kenya became independent in 1963, the country has had a sterling record of stability and peace in the last 44 years except for brief sparks. Most Kenyan Indians hold Kenyan passports and so they cannot just leave the country to settle abroad. Before any general election or any signs of disturbance, Kenyan Indians, especially the Gujaratis, store a month’s supply of groceries in their pantries so they can at least survive for some days even if they cannot go out to buy fresh supplies because of violence. And lots of Kenyan Indians go abroad on ‘holidays’ just before the elections to avoid the tension. These groceries came in handy during the past week of rioting.
The Indian government announced that urgent visas can be issued to Indians who want to come to India but going by the past performance, Kenyan Indians prefer to go to Britain, Canada or the US where they have their children or relatives and very few come to India. A large-scale evacuation of Indians to India is not on the cards as the violence is abating now that the African Union and Western powers are getting involved to bring peace.
Reports in the Indian media, usually after interviews with relatives in Gujarat or Mumbai, suggest that Gujaratis (mostly traders who later became small scale industrialists) are by far the vast majority of Indians living there. However, Punjabis – both Hindus and Sikhs – are also there in large numbers and make up at least a third of the total number. The Punjabis are mostly in the professional and service sectors. And all Gujaratis are not really Gujaratis or Hindus. In fact, most of the Hindu Gujaratis are from Kutch who went there as masons; and a good number are Muslims, including the Khojas, Bohras and Isnashiris from Gujarat and Maharashtra. Goans and South Indians are found in smaller numbers. So the Kenyan Indians make a very diverse community.
Another distortion in the Indian media is that Kenyan Indians are business partners with the majority Kikuyu tribe around Mt.Kenya. It may be true only for this area, but not in the Western region where Indians are partners with the Luo.
Kenyan Indians are estimated to be around 100,000 today but were three or four times this number when the country became independent. Ancient Indian merchant-sailors have been visiting the East African Coast since Biblical times by using the monsoon winds. In the 1890s, the British colonial government recruited labourers to build the Kenya Uganda Railway from Mombasa to Kisumu. After it was built against all odds, many Indians decided to stay on and work on the railways and became the nucleus of the community.
After independence, most of them held on to their British passports as they had a stamp on them to live and work in Kenya. In 1968, the British government announced a new rule to stop the entry of these Kenyan Indian passport holders and so there was the famous exodus to Britain. Another mini-exodus occurred in 1972 when Idi Amin threw out all Indians from neighbouring Uganda. During the attempted coup in 1982 by the Kenyan Air Force, hundreds of shops in the city centre owned by Indians were broken open and ransacked but no Indians were harmed or killed.
The general elections in 1992 and 1997 also saw some clashes but these were not serious. This time, the death toll is around 300, with many more injured and tens of thousands of Kikuyus fleeing to Uganda for their lives. As they remained indoors, Indians were not injured or killed. So when elephants fight, the grass does get trampled but it also grows again.
(Kul Bhushan previously worked as a newspaper editor in Nairobi. He lives in New Delhi and can be contacted at: [email protected].)