IN RECENT years India has made renewed diplomatic efforts to reach out to Africa. Manmohan Singh, India's former prime minister, visited the continent for six days in May 2011, promising $5 billion of loans on easy terms. Indian investors, like their counterparts from China, have a strong interest in winning access to immense natural resources in Africa, including oil, gas, coal and diamonds. Africa, potentially, offers a decent market for Indian firms, which have grown adept at "frugal innovation", that is making products that are both cheap and attractive, which might suit an emerging middle-class consumer in Africa as easily as the one at home. Indian telecom firms, for example, have expanded in Africa—while in turn India might learn from Africa about mobile-banking. A reasonably large number of Indians—or people of Indian origin—call Africa home, notably in large cities of southern and East Africa, such as Durban, but also in West Africa. In turn, over 10,000 African students attend Indian universities. Such links are an opportunity for India to engage in what diplomats call "people-to-people" ties. So it counts as a blow, whatever officials might claim, that the biggest-ever India-Africa summit, scheduled to be held in Delhi, early in December, was last month scrapped by India's government. Unlike other summits, when India has engaged only with selected African leaders (typically 16 or so), leaders of all the 54 countries in the African Union were to be invited to this one. In addition, the summit would have involved parallel business and media events, and involved some 1,000 people. Though in theory the event has only been postponed until next year, no provisional date has been set.

Relations between India and some of its African residents have not been rosy in the past year. After a Nigerian was stabbed to death in Goa last November, some 200 fellow Africans blocked roads in protest in the tiny Indian state, even as locals accused the foreigners of being illegal immigrants and drug dealers. Then in Delhi, under the brief and illiberal administration of the Aam Aadmi Party, a state minister orchestrated bullying and intimidation of migrants in one district of the city, where African women were accused of working as prostitutes. Finally, in September three African men in the Delhi metro were set upon by a racist mob. They took shelter by climbing atop a police control post.

None of that encourages friendly ties, but it might at least be set aside as the actions of an ugly, ill-educated minority, not official policy. Is it more troubling that Indian officials said they were scrapping the December summit because of the risk of Ebola being brought from Africa to India? That depends on how seriously you take the chance that it could happen. On the face of it, the people least likely to carry Ebola are presidents, prime ministers and isolated members of Africa's elite, who would have made up the delegations. No one in New York told Africans to stay away from the United Nations General Assembly, for example. And most obviously, Africa is not a country but a big continent. Three small West African countries are suffering from Ebola: Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. Pretoria (South Africa's capital) and Nairobi (Kenya's) are each more than 5,300km from Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, and seem hardly more at risk of infection than anywhere else on the planet. That is the equivalent, in Asia, of Indian politicians being uninvited from some international meeting because a disease had struck in Pyongyang or Phnom Penh.