India

by Shashi Tharoor

  The law defines NRIs in broad terms — not just as Indian citizens resident abroad, but as persons of Indian “origin” irrespective of their current nationality. “A person shall be deemed to be of Indian origin,” the government explains in a promotional brochure, “if: (i) he, at any time, held an Indian passport; or (ii) he or either of his parents or any of his grandparents was an Indian and a permanent resident of undivided India at any time.” New Delhi’s anxiety to define the category as broadly as possible has led to some interesting terminological calisthenics. Not only can anyone with one Indian grandparent declare himself an NRI and claim the benefits of that designation, but the “wife of a citizen of India, or of a person of Indian origin, shall also be deemed to be of Indian origin though she may be of non-Indian origin.” (Italics added. The semantic sexism is quite deliberate: the rules do not apply in reverse, to the foreign husbands of female NRIs.)

  These criteria, though liberal by international standards, still omit some who are visibly of Indian origin. One obvious problem, of course, is that if the NRI definition is interpreted literally, practically every citizen of Pakistan and Bangladesh would qualify as being of “Indian” descent. (The authorities have got around the implications of this by specifically requiring Pakistani and Bangladeshi nationals to obtain the prior permission of the Reserve Bank of India before seeking to avail themselves of any NRI facilities.) The NRI definition also disqualifies descendants of some of the earlier waves of Indian migration, mainly in the last century, to such far-flung outposts of Empire as Malaya and Mauritius, Ghana and Guyana, Singapore and Suriname. In most cases, nationals of those countries, though manifestly of Indian origin, are descended from migrants of earlier generations, higher up the family tree than their grandparents. Some of those expatriate communities did, however, renew their links to their ancestral lands through marriage with Indians from India, and so have the right to the NRI designation. But the vast majority of eligible NRIs are products of more recent migrations, mainly in the latter half of the twentieth century.

  Their stories vary. Many of the first Indian emigrants to Britain, for instance, went in search of an education and stayed on to work. Then, from the 1950s on, came less educated members of the working class, attracted by the liberalization of British entry laws during the labor shortages of the postwar boom years. A third wave of Indians came in the 1970s via East Africa, from where many were expelled in the xenophobic fervor that swept some African states after independence. All three groups, and their offspring, have acquired a reputation for hard work, business sense, and ethnic clannishness. Their success and, paradoxically, their failure to assimilate fully into British society have made them ideal NRIs — still owing residual loyalty to their Indian past, and usually well off enough to do something about it. This has appealed to all those in India who wish to court their support, not only the government but those opposed to it. It is no accident, of course, that some of the mother country’s extremist and secessionist movements have found aid, comfort, and hard cash from NRIs.

  The first Indian immigrants to the United States and Canada came as early as the 1890s, when shiploads of Sikhs settled on the Pacific coast and established thriving farming communities in British Columbia and California. Racist entry legislation — prompted by such events as anti-Indian riots in the state of Washington in 1907 — prevented them from adding to their numbers, however, and it was only a thin trickle of students who came to the United States from India after the 1920s. (As late as 1935, signs on the doors of certain California establishments declared, “No Jobs for Japs or Hindus.”) The number of Indian students began to increase after independence, and an increasing proportion of them stayed on, bringing high levels of academic attainment and valuable scientific and engineering skills to their new country. By the early 1970s the small but influential Indian minority was estimated as having the highest per capita income of any ethnic group in the United States. (As early as 1980 the median family income of the Indian American, according to the U.S. census of that year, was $25,644 per annum — at a time when the median income of white American citizens was $20,800.)

  It was the more liberal Immigration Act of 1965 that opened the sluice-gates to the United States. But while the trickle of Indian professionals became a stream, in more recent years it is illegal immigration that has swelled the flow into a torrent. Working-class Indians found their way into the United States for the first time in the late 1970s and early 1980s, toiling on construction sites, taking over newspaper kiosks on street corners, operating rundown motels, cooking and serving in Indian restaurants, and driving taxicabs. A pair of “amnesties” gave them the legal status they needed to bring their families over, and today this “third wave” of Indian immigrants accounts for about half of the estimated one million Indians in the United States.

  That figure is almost certainly an undercount, omitting as it does those who are still illegal and those who trace their direct descent from another center of the Indian diaspora, such as the Caribbean. But allowing for the approximations that are inevitable in such an exercise, there are major populations of Indian descent outside India, including over a million in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and South Africa; nearly as many in both Great Britain and the United States; and about half a million each in Mauritius, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana, with smaller but significant numbers in the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Singapore, Yemen, and Suriname. There are, of course, tiny Indian minorities in a variety of countries, from some twenty thousand in Hong Kong to a solitary couple in El Salvador — and (until his premature death in 1994) one lone Indian, Bezal Jesudason, on the last outpost before the North Pole, running a base camp and provision store for Arctic explorers in the wilds of the aptly named and remote Canadian settlement of Resolute. In a statement in Parliament in May 1988, the government of India estimated that there were some 10 million Indians living in 155 countries around the world, including eight in Iceland, four in Kampuchea, and one in the Pacific island state of Vanuatu. But the government’s figures conflated Indian passport-holders with known ethnic minorities of Indian descent, and its total of 10 million, though not an unreasonable guesstimate, cannot be arrived at by adding up the officially available statistics.

  Though the available numbers are not therefore entirely reliable, one area where the figures are more easily verified is that of the financial contribution made by NRIs to their motherland. Throughout the second half of the 1980s, remittances home from NRIs — primarily the diligent Indian workers in the countries of the Arab/Persian Gulf— averaged some five thousand crores of rupees ($1.5 billion) a year. As a source of foreign exchange, this amounted to 40 percent of India’s annual merchandise exports, or some 3 to 4 percent of the GNP. (In the state of Kerala, these remittances were responsible for generating a remarkable boom in the real estate and construction businesses, as money was poured into new housing for NRIs, and land values tripled in some areas.) In addition, NRI depositors placed over nine thousand crore rupees (nearly $3 billion) in external deposit accounts of Indian banks during the period 1976-88. Though the levels of these contributions may change from time to time, it is easy to understand why a government strapped for hard currency enthusiastically woos the NRI.

  What are the elements with which the NRI can be wooed? The obvious financial incentives — special terms on bank deposits, offers of government securities, and the facilitation of direct investment by NRIs in Indian industry — have already been among the principal features of the Indian government’s approach. But NRIs want more. One increasingly vocal demand has been for dual citizenship: Indian laws oblige an NRI who takes on the passport of his country of residence to give up his Indian nationality. NRIs have long argued that this is iniquitous, because while adopting a foreign country’s citizenship may be a matter of convenience (and sometimes of necessity), giving up Indian citizenship is an assault on their faith and pride. New Delhi’s official rules are based largely on the sound though increasingly outdated principle
that one cannot owe one’s loyalty to two sovereigns. NRIs argue that in today’s world of large-scale and rapid migrations, the passport one holds is no proof of one’s fundamental affinities and loyalties. Though not everyone’s motives are entirely idealistic, most NRIs who clamor for dual citizenship do so for reasons that have more to do with emotional identification than with practical advantage. In late 1991 the government of India provided some indications that this was a demand it was prepared to consider more sympathetically than in the past. But despite carefully hedged supportive words from Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, the idea dribbled away into the dry desert sands of the Indian bureaucracy, where it remained half-buried, to be brought out occasionally whenever NRIs needed to be wooed. Finally, in 2006, the government of India offered the trappings of dual citizenship to its NRIs by issuing a secondary passport to those who were prepared to pay for the privilege. But it was a citizenship shorn of many of the essential attributes of citizen’s rights, and only a cosmetic improvement on the so-called “saffron card” issued by the previous BJP government.

  An even more thorny issue is that of the right to vote. NRIs who are India citizens have made the point that while they are invited, indeed expected, to make a contribution to the country’s development and its balance of payments, they are allowed no role in influencing the policies of the country as voters. India is one of the few democracies in the modern world that has developed no tradition of absentee balloting for national elections, with the result that citizens living abroad are, in effect, disenfranchised. In 1991 the Kerala High Court even admitted a petition challenging India’s electoral laws, but the case went nowhere. If NRI citizens are indeed given the right to vote, the politics of Kerala — a state with more than a million Malayalis working abroad, and whose election results are often decided by margins of a thousand votes or fewer — would be dramatically affected. But this is not a question that is likely to be settled quickly; legal experts suggest the principles involved will probably take the issue all the way to the Supreme Court.

  Meanwhile, the NRI continues to make his way abroad, primarily on the strength of qualities regarded as “typically Indian” — hard work, discipline, self-sacrifice, and thrift. The way in which Indians have taken over unprofitable motels across the United States, and run newsstands in New York City or late-night groceries in London, is widely seen as reflective of those qualities. One American newspaper wholesaler told The New York Times that the Indians “basically replaced the old Jewish and Italian merchants and they’ve filled a tremendous void because nobody will put in the fourteen and sixteen-hour days that they do quite willingly and that you have to put in when running a newsstand.” A Londoner who discovers at midnight that she has run out of milk cheerfully decides to “go down to the local Indian.” A shopper in Hong Kong prefers to make her purchases at the Indian shops, rather than those run by the colony’s Chinese majority, because “you always get a better deal from the Indians. They’re willing to accept a smaller margin of profit than the others.” Not all the comments are entirely positive. “If you have a toxic dump to clean up,” wrote The Wall Street Journal, “there is a good chance than an Indian engineer’s company will do it. Not many U.S. firms want such dirty work.”

  By 1986 it was estimated that 28 percent of the 53,629 motels and small hotels in the United States were owned by Indians, largely Indians named Patel. “In Anaheim and along San Francisco’s Route 1 and in sections of Georgia, Oklahoma and Texas,” wrote an American journalist, James P. Sterba, “it is hard to find one that isn’t.” Sterba’s explanation was that “the Patels were security-conscious savers, eager to own property,” who took advantage of low prices and generous mortgage financing in the early 1970s. “A motel,” Sterba pointed out in the The Wall Street Journal, “provided property, home, business and employment for a large extended family.” Those motivations are widely considered representative of the new Indian approach to business opportunity abroad — a stark contrast to the earlier image of the studious Indian graduate who went from being every American professor’s favorite research assistant to becoming the hardest-working salaried employee of banks, laboratories, and research corporations. Though there are still Indian doctors and scientists of considerable renown (including two Nobel Prize-winning American scientists who were born, raised, and educated in India), the new wave of Indian immigrants is demonstrating that they, too, have the entrepreneurial spirit and are prepared to take the risks that their predecessors in the professional classes largely did not.

  A list of successful NRIs ranges from the likes of Dr. Hargobind Khorana, Nobel Prize-winning geneticist, and Dr. Subrahmanyan Chandrashekhar, Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist, to the Oscar-winning actor Ben Kingsley (born Krishna Bhanji), the millionaire British industrialist Lord Swraj Paul, and the conductor Zubin Mehta, and embraces both self-help guru Deepak Chopra and the United States’ biggest peach farmer, Didar Singh Bains. Salman Rushdie has a claim to the designation (and sued successfully for the restitution of property his father had owned in India). Most of India’s nationalist leaders, from Jawaharlal Nehru to the anti-Emergency opposition leader Jayaprakash Narayan, were NRIs at one time, though the term had not been invented while they lived abroad.

  With increasing affluence and visibility, the NRI is also beginning to develop political clout, though not yet at a level comparable to his new-found political clout in India. In Britain’s House of Commons, there are six members of Indian origin, though not all born in India, as well as two British Indian Members of the European Parliament. The unelected House of Lords has a handful of nominated NRI members. One Indian, Bobby Jindal, was elected to Congress in 2005, and is a strong contender for the governorship of Louisiana. An American of Indian descent, Dalip Singh Saund, did serve three terms in the United States House of Representatives in the early 1960s, representing a Los Angeles constituency. (Indians have sought the nominations to Congress of the major parties in recent years, without much success.) But if NRIs are not yet elected holders of national office, their influence on those who are is mounting. The hostility to India of certain American congressmen, particularly on the issues of Punjab and Kashmir, is directly attributable to the views — and the financial backing — of NRIs from their constituencies who are active in the “Khalistan” and Kashmiri separatist movements. Conversely, the sympathy for the Indian government’s positions usually extended by the highly regarded former congressman Stephen J. Solarz of Brooklyn was directly connected to the help and support he regularly received from well-heeled Indians in his New York district. Solarz frequently conducted direct-mail solicitation campaigns for contributions to his reelection that were targeted at voters of Indian origin.

  Nonresident Indians thus represent a growing force, increasing in numbers and financial strength, beginning to flex their political muscle and widely seen as a national resource for the regeneration of their homeland. What is often overlooked in India, though, is that as individual human beings NRIs face a range of social problems implicit in the immigrant condition: alienation, anxiety about their identity, dilemmas about the values in which to bring up their children. Are NRIs just what the term implies, Indians who happen not to be resident in India, or are they Americans, Britons, or Tanzanians of a different ethnicity than the majority of their new compatriots? Issues of discrimination in employment and housing, social and racial conflicts, differing levels of language skills, and varying degrees of social acceptance complicate the response to this question. And whatever passports they may currently hold, their loyalties are easily impugned in their new countries: in Britain, a former Conservative minister, Norman Tebbit, pointed out that Indian Britons at international cricket matches still supported the Indian team. (This was briefly undercut in June 1996 when England fielded, in their eleven for the first Test against India, no fewer than three players of Indian origin; but two of them soon lost their England places.) Salman Rushdie has written eloquently of the dilemma of the divided self, a dilemma all
NRIs, to a greater or lesser extent, live with every day.

  This can manifest itself in ugly ways, even when it does not transform itself into support for extremism. Some years ago a Malaysian friend sent me a clipping from the Singapore Straits Times with the provocative title “How India Changed Me.” It might not have been worthy of a second glance were it not for two things: its prominence (it occupied most of the editorial page of the paper) and what its contents revealed about the overseas Indian syndrome. The article purported to be the account of a journey in India and the lessons learned from it by the author, who sported an Indian name, P. N. Balji, and presumably a Southeast Asian passport. Balji began by confessing that he is usually “embarrassed” to talk about his visits to India, but that after his “recent trips” there, he is no longer so, “for I have discovered a new India. An India that jolts my conscience, helps me to educate my eight-year-old daughter, reminds me of the things I take for granted and that money cannot buy everything.”

  Unexceptionable so far? Perhaps, but Balji’s “new India” is not the India of industrial self-sufficiency, scientific research, or agricultural progress, or even the home of an ancient cultural heritage or profound spiritual values, all inferences that might reasonably flow from his earlier observation. It is an India that, if it bore the slightest resemblance to empirical truth, he and everyone else should indeed be embarrassed to talk about. Balji’s “rediscovery” starts at “the stuffy terminal building” of Madras airport, where “lean and hungry-looking porters wait watchfully at strategic corners.” Note the pejorative buildup to this startling story: “Suddenly a group of them descended on a helpless and unsuspecting woman passenger, who had a wailing baby in one hand and a handbag in the other. The result was probably a big hole in her purse or the loss of some items.”