If India were a revolving door, it would be spinning so fast that even the ghost of Gandhi might pause for breath. On one side, the country’s best and brightest are leaving with passports, visas, and resignation letters in hand. On the other, a steady stream of undocumented immigrants are arriving without papers, without plans.
India has the world’s largest diaspora: over 35 million people. Each year, around 2.5 million Indians left the country in search of better air, better jobs, and better governance. Over 3,98,000 received official emigration clearances in 2023. Add students, startup founders, and HNW individuals relocating to Dubai condos and Canadian townhomes, and you begin to grasp the scale of the churn. Nearly 2,26,000 Indians renounced citizenship in 2022. This may seem small compared to India’s 146.39 crore population, but their contribution to the economy is way disproportionate: a PRICE study says by 2030-31, the middle class and high-income segments would contribute nearly $2.7 trillion to incremental consumption. Imagine the loss from each citizen leaving town. What’s causing this haemorrhage? Bad roads and worse governance. Draconian tax regimes. Courts that take decades to deliver verdicts. Public hospitals that function like holding pens. Police stations that intimidate the complainant. These emigrants aren’t unpatriotic. They’re just done waiting. Meanwhile illegal migration floods the informal labour market, driving down wages and increasing competition for welfare. Try questioning it, and you’ll be branded as heartless, fascist, or worse.
The number of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants in India is between 2 million and 20 million. In Assam alone, it is estimated at 2 million. Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad are plagued by undocumented enclaves. In Odisha, nearly 3,800 Bangladeshi infiltrators were officially identified. Many Rohingyas—officially 40,000, unofficially, closer to 75,000—who are found in camps across Jammu, Jaipur, Delhi, and Hyderabad, possess forged Aadhaar cards and ration IDs while Indians que up for biometrics and background checks. In just two months between May 7 and July 3, 2025, India deported 1,880 illegal immigrants. That’s not even half a Delhi suburb. At this pace, it will take centuries to undo decades of demographic mismanagement. Why is one influx being ignored while another is tolerated, even encouraged?
One word: votes.
Across parties and decades, illegal immigration has been quietly weaponised into a long game of demographic capture. It isn’t just a “border” problem but a national issue with cultural, religious, and economic ramifications. The Congress that once claimed to fight for the soul of India has long since sold it for ballot paper. Voting rights for illegal migrants, particularly those sharing the right surnames or praying in the right direction have been quietly sanctified. Because the minority vote base must be preserved at any cost, even if it means diluting the very definition of citizenship.
Kerala’s communists invite Rohingyas in with moral smugness. Mamata’s demographic engineering is strategy; a porous border is a political wet dream. Nitish Kumar, once a regional bulwark of governance-first politics, has watched quietly as border districts swelled with undocumented settlers. A shift in religious demography isn’t some fevered nationalist hallucination; it’s a mathematical certainty. Entire districts in Assam and Bengal have seen double-digit swings in population profiles over the last decade. This isn’t just a refugee crisis. It’s a voter registration drive with a side of communal algebra. Paying for it is the salaried worker who forks out 30 per cent income tax and gets zero per cent governance in return. GST of 12 per cent is paid on popcorn while illegal shopfronts operate under political patronage.
Citizenship, it turns out, is the only status with no benefits. Now that the Election Commission wants to verify the basics of ‘are you even Indian?’, the same parties who orchestrated this mess are crying foul. They fear their fiction is being audited. They fear the ghost voters, the shadow populations, the overnight citizens will vanish in the daylight. And they should. Opposition parties say it’s being done close to the Bihar elections. That’s not timing: it’s triage. If not now, then when? After 2029? When half of Seemanchal is Bangladeshi and the rest are packing to leave? This isn’t about Hindus vs Muslims. This is about Indians vs non-Indians.
This is the quiet disaster of modern India. We are losing citizens and gaining non-citizens. Swapping skilled contributors for undocumented aliens. Watching software engineers fly out while untraceable migrants settle in. Donald Trump is being roasted by liberals for ruthless deportation of aliens. India has welcomed refugees before: Tibetans, Parsis, Jews with grace and compassion. But never before has migration been used as a political weapon to redraw the nation’s cultural and religious map. There is still time to stop it. Citizenship must mean something. Borders must mean something. And voting must mean something. Strip away these definitions, and what’s left isn’t a democracy. It’s a cartel of competing vote-harvesters.
India is becoming two nations. One is standing in line at the passport office. The other is registering to vote under a false name. One is sending remittances from Toronto. The other is receiving ration in Delhi. One believes in the rule of law. The other proves that law is negotiable. And all the while, political parties keep the ledger balanced, not in rupees, but in votes. We don’t just have a migration crisis. We have a citizenship crisis. The revolving door keeps spinning. The question is, who will be left to close it?