Images of a young Indian furtively glancing over his shoulder to check whether any of the flying bullets were coming his way and breathlessly speaking on his phone and telling anyone willing to listen to him that, unlike many Sudanese who were leaving the capital, Khartoum, and running to their villages, he had no place to go, are flooding language channels in the country. Besides feeding anxieties in different states, they are also lending a spin to an acrimonious election campaign in the state of Karnataka.
Expectedly, the leader of the Congress party, Siddaramaiah sought the intervention of Foreign Minister, S Jaishankar, to rescue some 31 Hakki Pikki tribals from Karnataka that were trapped in the war-torn country.
What is a relatively unknown tribe doing in distant Sudan? It is the same question that was asked by the uninformed about what 30,000 odd Indians were doing in Ukraine when the Russians began to pound artillery at little-known towns of East European country.