Migration trade-offs

SURESH NAMBATH
The Hindu, Dec 17 2008

Impact of India’s rising economy on the Indian diaspora in East Asian countries

RISING INDIA AND INDIAN COMMUNITIES IN EAST ASIA: Edited by K. Kesavapany, A. Mani and P. Ramasamy; ISEAS Publishing, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 30, Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Pasir Panjang, Singapore-119614.

Does India’s economic growth and widening influence hold implications for Indian communities in other countries? For long, people loosely identified as of Indian origin who had settled in other countries, especially East Asian nations, were thought of as being better off than the Indians in India. Those who managed to leave India also escaped from its poverty. However, this long-held perception is now changing. The boom in the Indian economy and the political and social pressures on Indian communities in the East Asian region in recent years seem to have more than closed the gap in economic prosperity between Indians in India and Indian communities in East Asia.

Case of Malaysia

Rising India and Indian Communities in East Asia, a collection of papers presented at a conference on the same subject organised by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, seeks to reveal the relationship between the rise of India and the lives of Indians in East Asia. The spread of India’s influence beyond the South Asian region opens up new avenues for Indian communities in other countries. There is greater expectation that India will be able to pressure the smaller East Asian nations to look into the grievances of the Indian communities. As the book puts it, “Politically, India might only exert a mild influence. However, economically and especially in the development of the software industry, India is expected to have a great impact.” Also, Indian communities that earlier viewed any assertion of the Indian identity as problematic in the countries of their residence now see advantages in seeking to re-establish an affinity with their “ancestral” land.

Malaysia, a country where political representation is organised on the basis of ethnicity, lends itself as a fit subject for study in the book. Home to a considerable Indian population, mostly Tamils who came as indentured labour during the British colonial period, Malaysia has witnessed a forceful assertion of Indian and Hindu identity in the last few years under the leadership of Hindraf or Hindu Rights Action Force. Unlike the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC), which has formal representation in the ruling coalition, the Barisan Nasional or National Front headed by the United Malay National Organization (UMNO), Hindraf is an oppositional group that is outside the official political framework of Malaysia.

Even the political rivals of MIC, the Indian Progressive Front and the People’s Progressive Party, have been co-opted into the political framework of Malaysia and are now supportive of the ruling coalition. As P. Ramasamy argues in “Politics of Indian Representation in Malaysia”, the MIC’s “basic methodology of representation is the cultivation of personal friendship with UMNO leaders at the national and state levels so that some minor concessions could be derived for the community.” A large number of Malaysian Indians thus feel the need for a political formation that would not compromise with the establishment and would speak for their rights from a position of strength.

Singapore

In Singapore, however, the situation is very different. Singapore’s population policy encourages skilled Indians to settle in Singapore. “The local Indian population should benefit from this influx through assimilation in the longer term,” according to G. Shantakumar and Pundarik Mukhopadhaya. The stress on immigration of professionals could also explain why the Indians lag in terms of sex ratios, with Singapore showing more males beyond age fifty. However, the Indians still have a long way to go to match the attainment of the Chinese population, who enjoyed a historical advantage in capital accumulation.

But globalisation of the Singapore economy as well as the Indian economy meant that Indian skills and capital could move easily to the city-state. Whether this could also end the market discrimination against Indian labour and reverse a situation in which qualifications from the Indian sub-continent are less-recognised is still moot, according to the authors of the paper on “Demographics, Incomes and Developmental Issues in Singapore”.

No assimilation

In Thailand and the Philippines, the Indian migration was mostly from the Punjab and the Sindh. As non-Muslims from these areas were extremely conscious of their ethnicity vis-À-vis Islam, they preserved their religious identity as Hindus and Sikhs after migration by maintaining close kinship ties, points out A. Mani. But Tamils in Thailand have been assimilated into Thai society through inter-ethnic marriage as they were small in number and felt no compulsion to zealously protect their Indian or Hindu identity.

In Japan, the migration of Indians is more recent. Many Indians came in from the 1990s onwards to work in the IT industry and stayed on. The migration is also on account of globalisation and liberalisation in India and the involvement of Japanese companies in the Indian economy. Indian workers in Japanese companies were sent to Japan for training. Japan being a developed economy, the situation of the Indian migrants is not comparable to that in other countries of East Asia.

Overall, Indians in East Asia did not undergo any assimilation process in the countries of the adoption. The book seeks to explain this by arguing that the requirement to assimilate was not strong on Indians because Indians, “unlike the Chinese,” were not considered a threat in the countries of their adoption. Whether a rising India will change the situation is difficult to foretell.