The many flavours of the diaspora

How did I meet these civil servants? Papeete is possibly the world’s most expensive holiday resort where the common summer streetwear for women is the bikini. I was therefore startled to see a group of sari-clad women ambling along the city’s main boulevard. Introductions revealed that they were married to senior officials of Indian origin in the French overseas service.

Since Pondicherry was once a thriving French colonial enclave, a large number of Indians joined the French foreign legion and the civil service. Some of these ended up in the French Polynesia, Papeete.

Considering that much of the Indian diaspora is scattered across the former British colonies, the limited number who travelled to French or Portuguese colonies via Pondicherry and Goa respectively, have remained largely unnoticed.

One also meets Indians in Angola and Mozambique but in much smaller numbers. After the massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda, an Indian businessman in Kigali showed me the loft in which he had hidden his Tutsi wife one full week to escape Hutu rage. Another Indian, a Muslim, actually ferried tens of Tutsis to safety. Possibly my most startling NRI discovery was one which left the US secretary of state, Warren Christopher, flummoxed. I was in Basra, exactly the place the US will cordon off for its oil when they begin the Iraqi fireworks, where an Indian, Hardarshan Singh Meijhi, was constructing a large housing complex for the Iraqi government. He performed the remarkable feat of not interrupting construction throughout the Iran-Iraq war.

Unbelievable though it may seem, one day Saddam Hussein himself directing operations in the sector, noticed a tall Sikh and his wife driving to safety from Iranian shelling. On learning of Meijhi’s mission, Saddam said: ‘Iraq will never forget what you have done for the country’.

Subsequently, after the Gulf War, when all payments to contractors were stopped due to the extraordinary difficulties Iraq was facing, Saddam’s direct intervention resulted in Meijhi’s payments being made in full.

This piece of information reached Warren Christopher, who was at that stage servicing several clients whose bills had remained unpaid. Christopher contacted Meijhi to bail out some of his clients! Notice the clout of just one NRI? The collective clout of the burgeoning Indian diaspora in the US, particularly during the Clinton years when the Silicon Valley was booming, is a continuing factor in Indo-US relations.

Has anyone ever driven north of Brisbane in Australia? Within a couple of hours you will enter the territory of Woolgoolga, known for some of the world’s largest banana plantations. All these plantations are owned by Sikhs.

‘Every schoolchild in Australia and across the Pacific who carries a banana to school is carrying one grown by the labour of men from the Punjab,’ boasts Darshan Kaur, daughter of Joginder Singh, one of the pioneers in the business. Visit the Canary Islands, the main street in Gibraltar, the shopping arcade in Andorra, jointly supervised by Spain and France, and the dominant presence of Indian shops is inescapable.

The romance of the Indian diaspora stretches from the Farroe Islands on the Arctic circle (where an Indian teacher keeps the flag flying) up to the tip of Africa, Cape Town, where I was introduced to Nelson Mandela, on the day of his release from prison, in the house of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, by one of the proudest Indians I have known: Yusuf Cachalia.

Yusuf and his wife Amina were among Mandela’s closest friends from the earliest days of the struggle against apartheid. One of Yusuf’s dreams was to have a street in his Gujarat village named after his father, Mohammad Cachalia, who was one of Gandhiji’s great companions. Gandhiji’s 21 years here were spent largely at the hospitality of Gujarati businessmen in Durban — Dada Abdullah, for instance.

Would it not have been a boost for our tradition of togetherness if Gandhiji’s Muslim associates in South Africa had been brought into larger focus? Some of their descendants are still around and thriving.

And we have shamelessly covered up for the Indian businessmen who collaborated with the Fijian racists who ousted Mahendra Chaudhry, the prime minister of Indian origin. Indeed, these businessmen, to ingratiate themselves with the racist establishment in Fiji, successfully lobbied against Chaudhry being given an award at the ongoing Pravasi Divas.

The fact worth exploring is this: which Indian political group received financial help from these despicable Fijian Indians?