Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s plans to address a gathering of the Indian diaspora in New York this week is likely to make explicit an important reality — the diaspora is where India’s domestic politics intersects with foreign policy. A deeply polarised Indian polity, in turn, sharpens the divisions within the diaspora.
Until now, the dominant Indian image of the diaspora has been a simplistic one. According to the cliche, the members of the diaspora served as India’s unofficial ambassadors to the world – they celebrate and spread Indian culture, win friends and influence people for the benefit of the homeland.
This romantic notion is increasingly at odds with the ground reality. The diaspora carries within it all the faultlines of the Indian society that find expression in their lives abroad.
Several factors have come together to make the interaction between India and its diaspora at once more charged, contentious, and consequential. The Indian political class has never been as divided as it is today. India’s internal gulf is bound to envelop the diaspora in the run-up to the 2024 general elections. Rahul Gandhi’s engagement with the diaspora in New York on Saturday comes less than three weeks before Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrives for a state visit to the White House. The PM is also expected to address a diaspora event in the US.
During his visit to the UK in March this year, Rahul Gandhi did not hold back on his criticism of India’s trajectory under the NDA government. He is unlikely to bite his tongue in the US either. The popular American notion that “domestic politics must end at the water’s edge” had some resonance in India too. The traditional Indian political reluctance to take domestic disputes abroad no longer operates.
Meanwhile, there are many structural changes in India’s relations with its diaspora. For one it is growing bigger by the day. One estimate puts it at about 33 million. These include Indian citizens studying, living, and working abroad as well as the people of Indian origin who have settled in other lands. According to the United Nations, the Indian diaspora is the largest in the world. As many countries hunt for talent to run their advanced industries, the demand for Indian professionals will continue to grow. The Modi government is promoting “migration and mobility” agreements that will facilitate more substantive flows abroad of Indian scientists, engineers, doctors, accountants, managers, and bankers. The global footprint of India, then, will continue to widen and deepen in the years ahead.
Second, the diaspora is richer and contributes in myriad ways to the Indian economy – from hard currency remittances to the air travel market, from consuming Indian goods to entertainment.
Third, the Indian diaspora is getting active in the politics of the host nations, especially in the Anglosphere which is more open to immigrants than other societies. The prime minister of Britain Rishi Sunak and US Vice-President Kamala Harris are just two examples of the widespread Indian successes in electoral politics in the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The English-speaking world is also the preferred destination of Indians, and the Indian presence in Western politics is only likely to grow.
Fourth, the diaspora’s engagement with Indian politics too has grown. Over the last few decades, the Indian diaspora has graduated from the passive role of extending support to presumed collective Indian goals or individual commitments to community development at home. The leaders of the diaspora now take active positions on the issues of the day in India. They mobilise their local political leaders and officials to take up their real and perceived grievances against Delhi. The retail politics of the English-speaking democracies make it easier to win support from local leaders, who might know little about the nuances of the issues they choose to speak on. Put simply, there is now a toxic interaction between India’s domestic politics and the activism of diasporic groups in the West.
Fifth, active Indian political engagement with the diaspora raises questions about meddling in the domestic politics of host nations. This is already a problem with China, where the party-state is extending its authority into other sovereignties through the diaspora. Delhi, of course, is not a political monolith like Beijing and has no desire to emulate Beijing on this score.
Sixth, the story is not just about India but of the Subcontinent. If you add the migrants from Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, the South Asian diaspora swells up to 45 million. You would think the shared culture between and across the subcontinent would bring the South Asian diasporas together in their new abodes. What we have seen instead is its deep fragmentation amidst competitive political mobilisation. Rallying Indian and Pakistani diasporas against the interests of the other homelands is only one part of the story. More troubling has been the resurgence of religious, ethnic, and caste solidarities that overwhelm the rich collective inheritance of the Subcontinent. Unconstrained by the nationalist framework at home, the other identities acquire much power.
That brings us back to Rahul Gandhi’s visit to the US. Although the Congress party has a much longer history of mobilising overseas Indians, it had ceded the space to the BJP. During the struggle for independence in the early 20th century, the Indian National Congress led the mobilisation of the diaspora. Besides the Congressmen, socialists of various shades, and the communists developed significant connections to Indians abroad as well as progressive forces around the world. As the structures of these parties atrophied, their internationalist engagement became erratic and ineffective.
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was the first to see the value of the diaspora in the pursuit of Indian foreign policy interests in the US. The Narasimha Rao government persisted with the idea as it galvanised the Indian diaspora in the US to fend off the anti-India campaigns organised by Pakistan in Washington. The early 1990s also saw a more fundamental effort to mobilise the US political and business classes to support broader Indian interests. But it was the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government that gave the engagement with the diaspora a significant new twist – by altering the narrative of “brain drain” into one of “political and cultural gain” for “Mother India”. Then came the annual Pravasi Bharatiya Divas. For the nativist BJP, without a traditional internationalist anchor, the diaspora became a powerful new constituency.
If the UPA government, which came to power in 2004, turned the PBD into a bureaucratic exercise, the BJP has seized the powerful new possibilities with the diaspora. Rallies with the diaspora have become an integral part of PM Modi’s engagements abroad. Extending support to Indians in trouble abroad had become a principal preoccupation of late Sushma Swaraj who served as foreign minister in Modi’s first term. Rescuing and bringing back Indians caught in danger zones around the world also became a high priority.
If PM Modi looms large over the diaspora today, the non-BJP forces in the Indian community hope that Rahul will lay out an alternative vision for India. It remains to be seen though if Rahul Gandhi has the strategic acumen and organisational capacity to break the Modi spell over the Indian diaspora in the US and beyond.
The writer is a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, Delhi and a contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express
