Why army chief is snooping around

Indian media reported on Monday a story you hardly read in East African media. It said the Indian army chief Manoj Pande was on an official visit to Tanzania to “strengthen defence ties between the two countries”.

The visit, they said, coincided with the 2nd India-Tanzania Mini Defexpo in Dar es Salaam, which showcases the growing prowess of the Indian defence industry complex.

We learnt that India and Tanzania have had an MoU on defence cooperation since 2003. That a second meeting of the India-Tanzania Joint Defence Cooperation Committee was held in Arusha on the June 28-29.

The Indian and Tanzanian armies do many things together, and a training team of the Indian military has been deployed at Command and Staff College, Duluti, in the Arusha area, since 2017.

When we think of involvement of non-African militaries in East Africa—and broadly, Africa—it’s the Americans, British, French and, lately, Chinese. Not India.

Gen. Pande’s visit came barely a week after US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ended his first African tour as Pentagon chief.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Austin visited Djibouti, which hosts Camp Lemonnier, officially the only permanent US base in Africa. In reality, there are over a dozen others of varying sizes and tenure.

In Kenya, he dropped in on Manda Bay, a Kenyan Defence Forces base utilised by the US military to provide training and counter-terrorism operations in eastern Africa. An attack there in 2020 by Somali Islamist group Al-Shabaab killed three Americans. Austin closed out his tour in Angola.

India is not a geopolitical rival of the US but analysts see its increasing visibility on Africa’s east coast as part of its response to its Brics partner China’s increasing assertiveness in the Indian Ocean rim.

As a report on Al Jazeera noted: “In recent years, China has increased naval deployments into the Indian Ocean, developed what some analysts call a “string of pearls”—a network of military and commercial facilities along the Indian Ocean littorals [coastal areas], effectively encircling India—and even established its first overseas naval base in Djibouti.”

Looked at another way, China, which formally opened its Djibouti base in August 2017, partly in reaction to the US, positioned itself in the Horn of Africa partly because India had cornered the southwestern flank of the Indian Ocean.

India has built a listening post in Madagascar and radar stations on the Seychelles and Mauritius. It doesn’t officially admit it but it has a $250 million naval base on North Agaléga, one of the Mauritian islands.

Intervened militarily

Well before the Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Emiratis and Saudis started building military bases and facilities in the Horn, India was already active further south. In 1983, it intervened militarily in Mauritius, in Operation Lal Dora, “to ensure that it stayed in India’s strategic orbit”, as one writer put it.

In 1983, then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi greenlighted the secret landing of Indian troops in Mauritius to help Prime Minister Anerood Jugnauth to foil a challenge from his rival Paul Berenger, whom India suspected was trying to stage a coup.

In Uganda, India got its name on a military facility developed through an unusual partnership. In eastern Uganda’s old industrial town of Jinja, the Indian Association Uganda (IAU), together with the Indian Military Advisory and Training Team in the country, built a war game centre, which was named “India”.

It was launched, amid flowery words about India, by President Yoweri Museveni in 2020. Museveni spoke of the “knowledge, experience and heroism” of the Indian army and said: “The epitome of India’s importance to Uganda is engraved in the fact that Mahatma Gandhi’s ashes were immersed in Jinja.”

There are over three million Asian-Africans on the continent, with most of them living in the swath from Durban on the Natal Bay of the Indian Ocean, South Africa, encompassing the island nations of Mauritius, the Seychelles, Madagascar and the countries further north to Ethiopia. Excluding South Africa, Indian trade with these countries to the year as of May was $4 billion—with Tanzania in the lead.

These “tribal”, security and economic interests have made eastern Africa a key geopolitical region for New Delhi, although it is playing its hand with stealth compared to the other “powers”. It has also broken from the rest by trying to wield technological power and knowledge.

This month, the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M) is opening a campus in Zanzibar, Tanzania. It’s the first foreign campus of the prestigious IIT, and part of New Delhi’s new foreign policy of “internationalising Indian education and expanding India’s reputation and diplomatic relationships”.

A wise man said, “Diplomacy is the velvet glove that cloaks the fist of power.” Has India taken his words to heart? How long India’s velvet glove will cloak its fist of power could be answered on an East African street in the not-too-distant future.

- Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. @cobbo3