Forget China — Is India Quietly Becoming Papua New Guinea's Real Foreign Power?

On September 9 this year, in a conference room in Port Moresby, the CEO of CPL Group — the company behind almost every City Pharmacy you’ve ever walked into — signed a deal with Apollo Hospitals, India’s biggest private healthcare chain. The plan: fly Indian specialists in, send PNG patients’ records out, and build “referral pathways” so we can be treated by doctors we’ll never meet in person. Nobody rioted. Nobody wrote an angry Facebook post. There was a press release, a photo of two men shaking hands, and then everyone went back to arguing about the Chinese-owned mine in Madang.

That’s the bit I can’t stop thinking about. Why is it that the moment a Chinese company so much as looks at a PNG resource project, half the country is ready to march — we’ve done it twice, actually, real riots, real deaths, in 2009 and again in 2024 — but a foreign community quietly buying its way into how we get our medicine, our money managed, and our kids taught barely rates a headline?

So here’s the question I want you sitting with while you read the rest of this: if PNG were slowly being run by people who aren’t Papua New Guinean, would we even notice which country they came from first?

Let’s deal with the numbers honestly, because I promised myself I wouldn’t just vibe my way through this one. India’s own government estimates there are only around 4,000 Indians in PNG — a rounding error against our population of over ten million. Compare that to the roughly 3,000–4,000 Chinese generally cited in PNG in past reporting, and it’s genuinely not a numbers game. This isn’t a flood. It’s something else: a small, well-organised community occupying an outsized number of chairs at the table. CPL — pharmacies, supermarkets, the Eagle Boys franchise — was built from nothing by a Fiji-born pharmacist who arrived here in 1983 with, by his own account, 35 Australian dollars in his pocket. Its current CEO, its CFO, its chief operating officer — all Indian names. Now it’s shaking hands with Apollo. India’s own diplomatic fact sheets talk openly about Indians working across IT, education, government contracting and trade in PNG, not just retail. The Chinese, by contrast, are still mostly where the 2009 riots found them: running the trade stores and small shops that keep getting torched whenever things get bad. Different footprint entirely.

Is that a problem? Genuinely, I don’t know that it’s automatically one — and I think intellectual honesty demands I say that before I say anything else. A country as thin on specialists as PNG arguably needs partnerships like the Apollo deal; PNG’s own health system is chronically underfunded, and private investment — whoever it comes from — has been filling gaps in our hospitals for two decades, from International SOS’s medevac network to church-run clinics to Australian-backed ventures. Indian doctors, teachers and engineers have been quietly propping up sectors we haven’t built enough local capacity for. That’s a real, unglamorous contribution, and it would be dishonest to write this essay as if it weren’t true.

But here’s where I want to be blunt about what actually worries me, because it isn’t the doctors. It’s the pattern of what happens when one migrant community, over one or two generations, ends up owning a disproportionate slice of a small economy’s essential services — its pharmacies, its hospitals, eventually its money — while everyone’s attention stays fixed on a different foreign power entirely. We have a case study for that, and it’s not flattering. Fiji.

I want to get the history right here, because it matters and it’s more complicated than “Indians took over Fiji.” Indo-Fijians didn’t choose to migrate the way PNG’s Indian community has — they were shipped there by British colonial administrators from the 1870s onward as indentured labourers for the sugar industry. That’s a fundamentally different starting point to a pharmacist landing in Port Moresby by choice in 1983, and I don’t want to flatten that distinction, because it isn’t fair to either group. What I do think transfers is the second half of the story: within a century, Indo-Fijians made up nearly half the population and dominated the sugar economy, business and the professional classes. In 1999 they elected Fiji’s first Indo-Fijian prime minister, Mahendra Chaudhry. Within a year, an indigenous businessman named George Speight held him and his cabinet hostage for 56 days, mobs burned Indo-Fijian shops in Suva, and Fiji rewrote its constitution to keep the top job out of Indo-Fijian hands. Seventy thousand Indo-Fijians left the country after the first coup alone. Whatever you think of how that community arrived, the lesson Fiji actually teaches is grim and simple: economic dominance without political accommodation is a countdown, not a stable equilibrium. That is the future I don’t want for PNG, and it’s the reason I think the size of a community matters far less than the size of what it controls.

And this isn’t just a Pacific island neurosis. Canada spent 2024 and 2025 in open argument about exactly this — record numbers of Indian students and workers arriving, housing prices climbing, and a public that increasingly blamed the two together, even though Canada’s own 2022 housing data attributed only around 11% of price growth to immigration overall. The backlash got ugly fast: vandalised gurdwaras in Brampton, a 15% jump in Toronto hate-crime calls targeting South Asians, turban-mocking caught on video. Britain, meanwhile, went the other direction and made an Indian-heritage man, Rishi Sunak, its Prime Minister, with two of his immediate predecessors as Home Secretary also of Indian descent — proof, if you needed it, that “the Indian diaspora” is not a single voting bloc with one agenda. One of those same Home Secretaries, Suella Braverman, campaigned for tighter immigration and specifically called out Indian nationals as the group most likely to overstay their visas in the UK. Even the diaspora argues with itself. That nuance matters, and I don’t want this essay pretending otherwise.

What I don’t trust, and won’t be citing as evidence of anything, is the manufactured outrage machine — the “Indians overran a Texas football game” nonsense currently being milked by American commentators who use words like “replacement,” a term that comes with genuinely dangerous baggage. That’s noise, not data. It tells you something about America’s current political temperature; it tells you nothing about Papua New Guinea.

Which brings me back home, to the actual question. I’m not anti-migration — I think that needs saying plainly, because it’s true and because this essay will get read as something it isn’t if I don’t. What I’m against is migration that quietly outpaces our ability to notice it, in a country that, frankly, doesn’t even keep good data on who owns what. Even India’s own government has admitted to its Parliament that it doesn’t properly track the size of its own diaspora. If Delhi can’t count its people abroad, what hope does Port Moresby have of counting who’s counting our money?

So here’s the question I’ll leave you with, and I mean it literally, not rhetorically: if a single foreign-origin community came to control our pharmacies, our private hospitals, a meaningful slice of our banks and our IT infrastructure over the next fifteen years — quietly, legally, deal by deal — would PNG have any mechanism at all for noticing before it was already done?