Passengers crowd the railway station in Ahmadabad, in the western Indian state of Gujarat. / Picture: AP
CHAPATIS ARE SERVED FOR CHRISTMAS, BIRYA-ni is a must for weddings. And samosas are forever. Indian-origin words and expressions like duka (shop), chapati and harambee are firmly embedded in Kiswahili.
Traces of India and Indians can be found just about everywhere in the leafy, sunlit streets of the Kenyan capital Nairobi, the economic hub of the East African region. Cultures and languages intersect effortlessly in Nairobi.
There are all-Indian malls, any number of Indian restaurants offering mouthwatering cuisine from different corners of India and theatres showing Indian films, giving visiting Indians the feeling that they never left India.
This familiarity with India and things Indian is not surprising; over 75,000 persons of Indian origin have been living here for over a century.
Meanwhile, the trade winds that first brought Indian traders to the East African coast centuries ago continue to blow today in a metaphoric sense.
Leading Indian industrial conglomerates like Reliance Industries, Essar and the Tata Group are now eying opportunities in petroleum, telecoms and infrastructure sectors in various East African countries.
This resurgence of Indian diplomatic and economic interest is not just confined to East and South Africa but encompasses the ethnically diverse and vibrant continent.
Led by a renewed focus on Africa policy by the government and private sector forays into infrastructure, industry, automobiles and mining, India’s economic engagement with Africa has increased dramatically in the past decade.
Today, Africa contributes nearly 15 per cent of India’s oil. Bilateral trade has increased from less than $1 billion in 1990-1991 to $36 billion in 2007-2008. The two sides have now set an ambitious target of achieving bilateral trade of $70 billion in another five years.
But this surge in India’s engagement with Africa has not, it would appear, led to a corresponding increase in popular contacts and knowledge about each other’s societies, culture, institutions and value-systems. Stereotypes and clichés continue to thrive stubbornly.
Kenya is synonymous with the wildlife safari for India’s rich and well-heeled; dark memories of Idi Amin throwing out Indians in 1972 continue to colour the image of Uganda, and not many have heard of Tanzania, except perhaps in geography books.
In media reportage and discourse, if Kenya and Tanzania figure at all, it is largely in the context of the bombings of the US embassies in 1998 and as potential bases for al-Qaeda.
ON THE OTHER SIDE, ALthough there is a greater recognition of India as a rising Asian power and an emerging technological giant, there is still a lack of information among Africans about what contemporary India is like. Indians are also virtually non-existent or nameless beings in histories, memoirs and biographies written about East African countries.
Most African media platforms continue to depend on Western news agencies for stories about India written from a Western perspective. Besides the general disinterest of the media, there is also a deficit at the level of exchanges between scholars, intellectuals, civil society, NGOs and think tanks of the two sides.
The role of the media in transformational diplomacy in today’s wired world can’t be overemphasised. It’s therefore tragic that both East Africa and India continue to remain misreported and underreported in each other’s media despite a veritable media boom, including the proliferation of new media like Internet and blogging, in both.
There is no dearth of success stories, but they often get overlooked in favour of four Cs — Crisis, Conflict, Catastrophe and Controversy.
The story of Somali pirates is one of a handful from Africa that have found their way into Indian newspapers recently.
Indeed, it made it to the front page of an Indian daily recently when a ship attacked by Somali pirates near Seychelles sought India’s help, which was touted as a sign of India’s growing presence in the Indian Ocean.
Soaring inflation in Zimbabwe and the antics of Robert Mugabe, whom an old generation remembers differently, and the “genocide” in Darfur are other news stories that sometimes sneak into the international pages of Indian dailies. Africa is also in the news when Indians living there are kidnapped (as happened in Sudan last year) or hurt in violence.
The brighter stories of Africa conjuring up “a continent of hope” that is negotiating its own renaissance get sidetracked in the process. Not many know about the ICT revolution underway in East Africa or the fact that some of the world’s fastest-growing economies are in sub-Saharan Africa.
How many are aware that Rwanda, once the site of genocide, is now leading the region in using IT for poverty-reduction and education? That farmers in East African villages are getting disease alerts on their mobile phones?
Ignorance and misrepresentation are pervasive. For most Indians, Africa is not a continent comprising 53 independent countries, given that they often speak of it as if it were one country. “Are you going to Africa?” You will be asked when you are actually going to Kenya or Tanzania.
South Africa is easily the best-known African country in India and is often equated with the whole of the continent.
Right now, South Africa is on prime time news on virtually every TV network in India, but not because of the elections or the historic transition of power underway there. It’s because of a new glamourised, Bollywoodised version of cricket called the Indian Premier League.
NELSON MANDELA STR-ikes a chord, but if you ask them about African leaders like Kenya’s Mwai Kibaki, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, South Africa’s Jacob Zuma or Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, don’t be surprised if they stare back at you vacantly.
“Misinformation about Africa has become a growth industry in the West,” said British writer Ama Biney. While it has not become an industry in India yet, Indian media outlets, which primarily rely on Western news agencies for Africa stories, have been sucked into this game of distortions by extension.
Not too long ago, the Western media also reported on India in the same despairing, grim and stereotypical manner as Africa continues to be pictured till now. Images of stark poverty, human degradation, appalling sanitation blithely blended with pictures of hashish-smoking holy men, snake charmers, opulent Rajasthan maharajas and pilgrims dirtying the holy Ganges with their bodily grime and multitudinous sins.
Up until the mid-1990s, these images dominated the West’s perception of India and those who smugly plugged into these images, thanks to the colossal power of media transnationals that control the global flow of information and ideas.
Suddenly, India’s image changed as the West began to look at the country with new eyes and one could see respect and grudging admiration in them where earlier one could see a mixture of benign condescension and outright contempt.
Two signal events catalysed this paradigmatic change in the West’s perception of India. The economic reforms the country embarked on in 1991 under the leadership of the then finance minister Manmohan Singh, who is now the prime minister, ignited the interest of multinationals looking for new middle-class markets abroad.
Second, India defied the nuclear apartheid system instituted by the P5 (permanent members of the UN Security Council and official nuclear weapon states) and conducted nuclear tests in 1998. The initial reaction in Western capitals was one of shock and outrage, followed by sanctions.
But a couple of years later, India’s most vocal detractors were reaching out, a protracted process of rapprochement that culminated in the signing of the landmark India-US civilian nuclear deal last year.
The five million-strong Indian-American community and robust people-to-people contacts played a pivotal role in the transformation of the official relationship between the world’s once estranged democracies.
But inbred prejudices and snobbery, combined with pretensions to higher moral standards, don’t die easily.
The international press has reported and reflected on the rise of India, but has also been quick to pounce on any negative story that could rekindle their old prejudices. The discourse has now changed to the story of ‘Two Indias,’ as a Time cover story was entitled last year.
The story captured and dramatised the shocking contrasts between benumbing poverty and opulence that exists in the 21st century India. And very often it is these negative stories that stick in the mind.
One is tempted to call it the Slumdog Millionaire phenomenon, after the Oscar-winning British film set in India that shows a mere tea-seller winning a billion-dollar quiz show.
The movie has rekindled an intense debate in India about how the country is portrayed in the Western mass media, with critics deriding it as “poverty porn.”
PUT TOGETHER, THIS FORBI-dding wall of misinformation and misrepresentation has led to an impoverished understanding of the nature of the India-Africa partnership and its potential to spur the pursuit of common developmental and larger geostrategic goals.
“It is our intention to become a partner in Africa’s resurgence,” Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told African leaders at the first India-Africa forum summit in New Delhi in 2008.
Underlining the need for creating “a new architecture for our engagement in the 21st century,” Singh said: “No one understands better than India and Africa the imperative need for global institutions to reflect current realities and to build a more equitable global economy and polity. Working together, the two billion people of India and Africa can set a shining example of fruitful co-operation in the developing world.”
But if one billion-plus people from both sides do not understand each other adequately and know enough about each other, how can they come together in the quest for resurgence? The India Africa Framework for Co-operation, issued at the end of the India-Africa Forum Summit, sought to address this information gap and stressed promoting cultural, educational and media exchanges between the two sides.
“Africa and India agree that closer linkages and co-operation in the field of media and communications will generate greater synergy in their relationship, enhance a South-South communication culture, enable more systematic use of their shared cultural and social heritage and also improve the process of economic development in Africa and India,” says the framework.
TO BRIDGE THE INFORMA-tion gap, India’s Ministry of External Affairs is also supporting a pioneering initiative by IANS, an Indian news agency, to launch a pioneering website called IndiaAfrica Connect that will serve as one-window stop for important news and views on India. The portal is expected to be online in June.
There is also a move by Indian news agencies to post more correspondents in key capitals of African countries. The India-supported Pan-African e-network, that seeks to bridge the digital divide among African countries, is already on its way to becoming reality.
There is also a plan to promote Track II dialogue between India and Africa. Leading Indian think thanks like the Observer Research Foundation are also thinking of promoting a Track-II dialogue between India and Africa.
No region on the continent is more suited to starting a vigorous and multilayered dialogue with India than East Africa. Be it biryani, pulao, chapatis, Kiswahili is full of words of Indian origin and every time an East African sits down to eat, he is in some sense connecting with India.
Bollywood films are popular and Hindi music has impacted on African music. Mombasa singer Juma Bhalo is known for improvising on Indian film songs.
Recalls Ali Mazrui: “When I was growing up, Indian movies were a regular feature in Mombasa. There even used to be a special institution called Ladies’ Night — a screening of Indian movies, especially organised for ladies, where men were not allowed.”
Mazrui feels that India’s “soft power” has had a much bigger cultural impact on Africa than the Chinese or the Japanese.
“An older Asian power in Africa is Japan and it has next to no cultural impact except for economic, trade and some diplomatic co-operation. You don’t easily get to listen to Japanese music or Chinese movies,” he said.
This cultural interconnectedness shows that the seeds for a dialogue of cultures between India and Africa are already there, but they need to be watered carefully to allow it to bloom.
And sometimes rare flowers bloom in hard times. The global recession, which has underlined the fatal flaws of a recklessly predatory capitalistic system, is an opportunity for India and Africa to rediscover each other anew and forge new bonds of understanding.
It’s time for a new cultural Bandung, as chairman of Unesco Executive Board and and scholar Olabiyi Babalola Joseph Yai says.
“I am no Orientalist, but I know that African cultures and the cultures of India are convergent. The two cultures are based on very similar weltanschauung.
For millennia, they have emphasised the oneness of existence, the harmony between gods, nature and human beings. They both believe in the formula: I am because we are,” said Yai in a lecture in New Delhi.
QUOTING INDIA’S POET-philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, Yai said Africa and India have the potential for becoming the “wisdom nucleus with the capacity to recognise those elements that could drive our humanity back to the moral orbit, a sine qua non condition for a newly appeased humanism and globalisation with a human face.”
Conversation is central to any relationship, be it friendship, marriage or diplomatic engagement. In today’s intensely competitive, communication-driven world, telling stories and listening to each other, sans intermediaries, is absolutely essential to building better relations. Soft power, as Joseph Nye says, can be more effective than hard power.
Let’s hope the walls of misperceptions and partial knowledge crumble in the days to come and a genuine dialogue begins between the two billion people of India and Africa. The seeds are there. In the words of US President Barack Obama, the man Kenyans love to call as one of their own: Ndiyo Tunaweza (Yes, We Can).
Manish Chand is the editor of the Africa Quarterly, published from New Delhi. E-mail: [email protected]
