Persecuting and Prosecuting: The Politics and Others of Indians from East Africa

Paper Abstract: This paper analyzes the confluence of three processes: the experience of migration and displacement, an investment in civilizational and religious hierarchy, and the attachment to empire and nation. I examine how they converge in political attitudes of Indians with roots in East Africa, who amidst decolonization in the 1960s and African nativism in the 1970s, moved to the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries. Indians of trading and merchant communities had a comfortable niche in Africa during British colonial rule. They were professional intermediaries and privileged in imperial taxonomies vis-à-vis African subjects. First displaced from South Asia, then from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and other ex-British colonies, this community acquired notoriety in recent years, with the rhetoric of politicians such as Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman, and Priti Patel in the British Conservative party. Such politicians, emotive nationalists and aversive to immigrants, reflect conservative inclinations among Indian constituencies in the west.





In anglophone scholarship, especially from America, ethnic diversity is equated with progressive politics, and racial identification serves as a primary social marker. This elides the historical conjunctures by which mobility under duress, attitudes of superiority and meritocracy, and ideals of tradition shape community sensibilities. This paper, concentrating on the political attitudes of Indians from East Africa, employs comparative research on analogous minority communities – such as Algerian Jews who came to France after decolonization in the 1960s, and Chinese merchant communities in Southeast Asia – to explore the complex political dispositions forged out of empire, decolonization, and displacement.