The spectacle of handcuffed and shackled illegal Indian migrants off-loaded from US military aircrafts at Amritsar, after their expulsion from the US was, no doubt, disgraceful. In the US, it is not just illegal migrants, but legal workers, Green Card holders, as well as citizens, who are coming under the scope of President Trump’s sweeping campaign against migrant communities, with a range of illegal and unethical measures— such as preventing re-entry into the US after a trip abroad and attempting to coerce “voluntary” surrender of Green Cards, as well as preventing entry of individuals with valid visas—being repeatedly documented since the beginning of Trump’s second presidency. While the crudeness of current actions was not, then, so visible, it is useful to recall that, on average, 1,550 Indians were deported annually during Trump’s first term in office.
The growing racism in the US, and the wider West is a reality that Indian Diaspora communities, and those contemplating emigration— legal or otherwise—will increasingly have to contend with. But the entire burden of culpability can hardly be placed on the racism of host communities, the ‘original citizens’—a misnomer in the US, where the presently dominant population of Christian Caucasians is the outcome of the most successful genocide in history, which wiped out almost the entire indigenous population.
Over the past decades, increasingly ‘bad behaviour’ among migrant communities has provoked a backlash. There is, moreover, a failure—often a refusal—to integrate with host cultures, with migrant communities clustering in ethnic and religious ghettos and seeking to recreate the very cultures they escaped by migrating. These ghettos often reverberate with the toxic politics of the home countries as well. The situation was infinitely worsened with the injection of Islamist terrorism creating fear and increasing reliance on force and legal prohibitions to contain such manifestations. The escalating sentiment against migrants has substantially fuelled the resurgence of ‘right wing’ politics in the US and the wider West.
It is useful to recall, here, that the Indian Diaspora is the largest in the world, estimated at about 18 million by the UN World Migration Report 2024, and nearly double that number, at 35.42 million, by India’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Indians abroad, for long, remained largely insulated from many of the deleterious developments that afflicted other migrant communities. People of Indian origin were generally regarded as law abiding, progressive, productive and an asset to the host countries. Many Indians have risen to the highest ranks in the political, administrative and corporate structures of host countries. These positive images have been cemented by the often-extraordinary role played by Indians, as in the case of Sikh organisations providing massive voluntary relief during Covid.
Regrettably, these images have been rapidly diluted over the past years, and several factors have been responsible for this. The first of these is a gradual but sustained transformation in the profile of migrants from India—with increasing numbers of unqualified, often uneducated, migrants journeying to the West, many of them illegally. Worse, among these has been a significant proportion of criminal elements, and they have huddled into gangs abroad, often with linkages in the home country, engaging in a range of activities that undermine security in both the home and host countries. Indian gangs have now come to dominate organised crime in Canada, and their networks have a significant presence in the US, in Europe, as well as in many other countries across the world, bringing odium to the wider Indian Diaspora. As with other migrant clusters, the Indian Diaspora has carried the politics of the home country into their new homelands, with disorderly and raucous public demonstrations that do nothing to enhance the image of India or of the Indian Diaspora. The emergence of a terrorist-gangster nexus—most prominently the Khalistani-gangster nexus—in several countries, but particularly visible in Canada and the US, has darkened these images further. These patterns have been compounded by the actions of the Indian government in recent years, and its crude instrumentalisation of the Indian Diaspora as a proxy in its battles against dissident elements on foreign soil, and also as a vehicle for purported ‘soft power projection’. Harping on the ‘power of the Indian Diaspora’, the present regime in New Delhi has engaged in increasing interference in the domestic politics of several host countries, even as it has exported its own political agenda to alienated sections of the Diaspora, paving the road to ethnic isolationism, polarisation and hatred.
The overwhelming focus, at present, is on the Trump administration’s largely lawless actions, but it is necessary to recognise that the problem goes well beyond Trump, and is affecting, or will soon afflict, the Indian Diaspora in many other countries as well. Sagacious elements among persons of Indian origin abroad, as well as the Indian government, would do well to rejig their priorities and conduct, in view of the dismal realities emerging across the world.
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