India's extended family

What India wants from its brethren abroad, and vice versa

THERE was a time when India’s government paid little attention to its diaspora—a vast extended family of about 25m people on whom the sun never sets. A 2001 report complained that the Indian public was unacquainted with the “kaleidoscopic traits of its Diaspora”, that the diaspora’s deep reserves of goodwill were “waiting to be tapped”, and that overseas Indians’ efforts to give something back to their mother country were stymied by “unresponsive policy”.

This negligence was perhaps understandable. India has never been short of people, and deep down, its policymakers may have felt they could afford to spare a few million to other nations. Whenever the country ran short of foreign exchange, it would rely on Indians abroad to deposit their pounds and dollars in Indian banks, or remit their riyals and dirhams to Indian families. Relatives would also expect a suitcase full of gifts from “foreign” (as the rest of the world was called) whenever their far-flung sons and daughters returned home. But that was about it. The diaspora expected little of India (that was why they left) and India in turn made few demands of them.

AFPIndian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh greets delegates

That equation has changed. On January 9th, India concluded its seventh “Pravasi Bharatiya Divas”, the annual jamboree for NRIs (non-resident Indians) and PIOs (people of Indian origin, who are now citizens of another state). Over the two-day conference in balmy Chennai, it became clear that the mother country now expects rather a lot of its diaspora—and that some of them now have their own designs on it.

“You are our permanent ambassadors”, the delegates were told by one minister. India believes it would not have passed the Indo-American nuclear deal last year without their help behind the scenes. Barack Obama, then on the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, told the International Herald Tribune in 2006 that “there appears to be a very co-ordinated effort to have every Indian-American person that I know contact me”.

At the Chennai conference, the minister for external affairs thanked delegates for their “tremendous support” in securing the deal, then asked for more. He urged them to press India’s case in the Doha round of global trade talks and called on them to carry India’s concerns about terrorism to the world stage.

That is not all: India also wants to make more of its diaspora’s financial muscle. It already receives more remittances from migrant workers than any other country: $27 billion in 2007, according to the World Bank. Its banks hold NRI accounts worth $38.7 billion. But India’s government is not yet satisfied. The diaspora’s collective economic output is as much as $400 billion a year, according to India’s Minister for Overseas Indian Affairs. But “the role of the Indian diaspora in India’s economic growth has been much less than what it is capable of,” he said in a speech in Seattle last year, according to the Economic Times, an Indian newspaper.

The government is keen for its diaspora to invest in long-term ventures, rather than just sending wire transfers and short-term remittances. China’s diaspora, it points out, accounted for more than half of that country’s inward investment during the 1990s, if Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan are included. Colonel Harmit Singh Sethi, director of the new Overseas Indian Facilitation Centre in Delhi, is keen to help the diaspora invest back home. He shuffles a fistful of business cards he picked up at the Chennai bash. But many of them were from professionals eager to midwife investments by matching Indian companies with foreign money or technology, rather than from potential investors.

The diaspora seemed anxious not to disappoint their mother country. But the Chennai conference was also an opportunity for India’s “permanent ambassadors” to make a few demarches of their own. A gentleman from Kuwait wanted the right to cast ballots in Indian elections. A man from Saudi Arabia wanted India’s national carrier, Air India, to repatriate the deceased free of charge. A third simply wanted a bigger passport, with more pages for all the visas he collects on his travels. But the biggest contingent at the conference was from Malaysia—and they were not there to swap business cards.

The Hindu Rights Action Force (HINDRAF), a political group that Malaysia has banned, circulated a fiery report on the plight of Malaysia’s Indians, many of whom trace their roots to indentured labourers shipped to the peninsula three or four generations ago. It urged the Indian government to slap trade sanctions on Malaysia, including a boycott of the country’s palm oil, until Malaysia’s government stopped discriminating against the Indian minority. The report couched its demands in the same rhetoric invoked by the Indian government, appealing to the shared heritage of Indians.

But common descent does not translate into common cause. Before the day was over, Datuk Seri S. Samy Vellu, the President of the Malaysian Indian Congress, called a press conference of his own to rubbish the report. Mr Vellu, a fixture at the conference, is one of the first recipients of the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman award in 2003, which honours notable members of the diaspora. But his political star is fading and his rivals for leadership of Malaysia’s Indian community were also out in force. One of them, the deputy chief minister of the Malaysian state of Penang, was recognised as the guest of honour at one of the smaller sessions.

By reaching out to its diaspora, then, India’s government risks becoming embroiled in their politics. Indeed, some scholars believe that India’s past neglect of its brethren abroad may have been a blessing in disguise. Because the Indian government failed to mobilise its diaspora, overseas Indians were rarely under suspicion from their host governments. Overseas Chinese, on the other hand, were long feared in South-East Asia and beyond as a potential fifth column for a powerful communist state that might want to export its revolution.

India’s government is keen for the diaspora to help fight its battles. But the diaspora too can play that game. Extended families can be warm and cosy. But sometimes relatives benefit from a little distance.