Syed Farooq Basha from Kurnool in Andhra Pradesh was killed on February 17 in South Sudan. A targeted attack is not ruled out, though the greater probability is that he caught some of the crossfire in South Sudan’s long-running civil war.

Basha did not capture headlines the way Indian engineer Srinivas Khuchibhotla’s killing in Kansas did a few days later. That was unsurprising, since most people would have difficulty locating South Sudan on the map.

The perspective might change if the vast oil reserves in South Sudan — estimated to be among the largest in Africa — were taken into account. Indian oil exploration major ONGC has significant investments in these oilfields.

Basha’s killing while on assignment with a private company engaged in oilfield services drew a swift response from India’s ministry of external affairs. India’s diplomatic mission in Juba, the South Sudanese capital, was directed to bring him home for burial. There was no mention of any protest lodged with the counterpart government, perhaps since there is no such functioning entity there.

A few days later, the United Nations formally declared conditions in South Sudan as verging on famine. As the civil war ground on relentlessly, reckless military methods by both sides raised very real fears of genocide.

It was not a very happy place for the world’s youngest country, formed in 2011 after a referendum in which separation from Sudan was the overwhelming choice. This seemed an amicable separation after a civil war that had raged in sporadic fury over decades, once drawing in Cold War rivalries before mutating and changing ideological colours after the Soviet collapse.

The Soviet-aligned Ethiopian regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam was in early years the main backer of the insurgent Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army (SPLA), then committed to a secular political order within a unified state. With the dawn of perestroika, the Soviet Union decided to divest itself of its more burdensome Cold War legacies. The Mengistu regime, stigmatised by a record of brutality, was among the first to lose favour.

The SPLA was reduced to disarray but regrouped with patronage from Uganda and Eritrea, and after 1995, with the overt military backing of the US. This was part of the US strategic outreach in the continent, which involved assembling an African Rapid Deployment Force in partnership with local governments. Sudan meanwhile had fallen from favour after the pro-western dictatorship of Gaafar Muhammad an-Nimeiri was replaced by an Islamist order in the mid-’80s.

Forced to forage for financial support and arms from every available source, the SPLA suffered serious internal fractures and a debilitating erosion of its political purposes. Independence came in remarkably unpropitious circumstances. Aid and financial flows had been paralysed by the global meltdown of 2008. And the newly independent State had no pathway into global value chains, except by putting its basic assets in hock.

Within the accelerating trend of sovereign countries selling off vast land expanses for colonisation by foreign agri-business, South Sudan has been ahead of the rest. The lease of 6,00,000 hectares for the derisory annual fee of $25,000 to a Texas-based firm was agreed before its independence. The deal covered all resources within the relevant tracts of land, including oil and minerals. It perhaps helped that the chairman of the firm buying into the land was US “ambassador at large” for humanitarian matters, whose compassion was stirred by the supposed persecution of South Sudan’s Christian community.

Independence was about the striving of the people involved and in large part, about the agendas that external agents imposed. The SPLA reinvented itself in the ’90s as the hapless victim of hegemonic Arab cultural imposition from the north, and a threatened enclave of Christianity within the Islamic expanses of Northern Africa.

With independence came the realisation that an appeal to kindred religious spirits could not sustain a nation. A mobilisation by civil society groups and farmers soon afterwards forced the cancellation of the land deal with the Texas firm. Yet the South Sudan government has pressed ahead with making large gift parcels of farmland for foreign entities. In March 2016, Vice President James Wani Iqqa attended a conclave in Delhi organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the Exim Bank of India.

South Sudan’s developmental priority was “small and medium enterprises” said Iqqa, and this required big funding for road infrastructure and a dam across the Nile. These were readily “bankable” projects and could proceed without the inconvenience of a feasibility study. Indian companies were also invited “to invest in South Sudan’s agriculture sector”, since large tracts of land were on offer “almost for free”.

There is no firm estimate of India’s investments in South Sudan’s land. The significant Indian land purchases in the neighbouring Ethiopian province of Gambella, for long an SPLA haven, may provide some index of long-term consequences. The diversion of land in Gambella away from traditional uses into floriculture in the main has resulted in displacement, loss of livelihood and growing dependence on food aid. A research project at Sweden’s University of Lund has found that large land acquisitions by foreign agribusiness has caused significantly increased conflict potential between communities.

Coming on top of long years of strife, Indian entrepreneurship in Africa is clearly doing very little to enhance hopes. If anything, it is multiplying fractures and creating fresh potential for conflict.

Sukumar Muralidharan in an independent writer and researcher based in Delhi NCR

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