During a special briefing on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the US, a Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson was asked whether the manner in which Indian undocumented immigrants were deported (in military aircrafts with their legs shackled) was raised. The question was side-stepped. The joint statement released by India and the U.S. makes no mention of the treatment of deportees, instead focussing on taking strong action against illegal immigration. Since Modi’s visit, two more such flights have landed in India, in which deportees have continued to be shackled. In an additional act of humiliation, Sikh deportees are reported to have been deprived of their turbans.
On the other end of the spectrum to India’s silence on this, Colombia nearly sparked a trade war with the US in January when they refused to let American military flights containing similarly shackled Colombian deportees land. Eventually, two Colombian Air Force planes were sent to the US, to ensure their deportees were returned to Colombia with dignity.
Colombia’s broadly successful intervention (the issue was resolved without any tariff related retaliation) indicates that the Indian government’s reluctance to raise the matter is not one of relative bargaining power with the US It points to the Modi government’s troubling reimagination of the diaspora.
Colonial narratives and the modern anti-immigration discourse
Frantz Fanon describes how colonisation does not limit itself to physically controlling the space of the colonised. In the discourse of colonisation, every aspect of the lives and society of the colonised must be painted as some form of absolute and irredeemable evil. This then provides the moral justification for colonisation (and any brutality it entails) in the eyes of the coloniser. It is also used to prevent the colonised population from seeking admittance into the metropole. Modern anti-immigration discourse in the West builds on these same narratives — immigrants are often accused of bringing their native culture to the West or of refusing to “assimilate”.
In 1927, American historian Katherine Mayo wrote Mother India – a book arguing that Indian social customs were so barbaric and sexually degenerate that they made Indians unfit for self-rule. While Mayo’s analysis might seem comically racist, a cursory glance at online racism in the West today demonstrates a very similar approach. Violent crimes against women in India are very often used by racists to demonise Indian and other South Asian immigrant men as threats to women abroad.
Donald Trump’s entire deportation spectacle — an expensive shift from the earlier practice of using chartered commercial planes — is a deliberate nod to these narratives. It is done to reinforce the impression that these are criminals being removed from American society. By shackling these young men, the fact that the only laws they have broken are the immigration laws that prevent their entry is de-emphasised and the spectre of the dangerous brown male, socially regressive and unfit for admittance into Western society, is re-created. The government of Colombia appears to have understood this message and immediately moved to counter it, with President Gustavo Petro insisting that “a migrant is not a criminal and must be treated with the dignity that a human being deserves.”
While Trump’s reasons for engaging in this spectacle are easy to understand, the Indian acceptance of it is more complicated – both at the level of the diaspora and at the level of the government.
Also read: Three Things About India that Shackled Indians Returning Home Tell Us
Since the 1960s, Indian immigration to the West has been almost entirely from what is termed the “middle class” (a euphemism for the relatively well-off, often upper caste, urban Indian, rather than middle class in any real economic sense). The working classes, by contrast, tended to seek jobs in the Middle-East or South-East Asia. This has changed in the last decade. Agrarian distress, especially in the green revolution states, and youth unemployment in areas like northern Gujarat have forced blue collar workers to attempt migrating to North America. While countries like Canada offer (or used to offer) legal routes for such blue collar immigration, the so called “donkey” routes are often the only way for Indian blue collar immigrants to reach the U.S.
It is not uncommon for Indians in the diaspora to speak derisively of these newer immigrants (irrespective of the legality of their entry) as “ruining the image” of the otherwise “highly educated”, “successful” Indian diaspora. In some senses their enthusiastic support for Trump’s deportation spectacles is a performance intended to create a public distinction between themselves and this new category of Indians in the eyes of white Americans. Possibly, they hope that this differentiation will shield them from racism. Hence the “legal” immigrant is well educated, often upper caste, successful and law abiding, while the often backward caste blue-collar “illegal” immigrant is a criminal who must be deported in chains, despite the fact that many of these young men are themselves the victims of scam immigration agents, who have stolen their life’s savings promising a safe and legal path to the U.S.
Modi and the diaspora
The Indian diaspora has always been deeply connected with Indian politics. Prior to independence, the diaspora (which was then predominantly working class) often advocated for the cause of Indian independence abroad. The treatment of this diaspora abroad in turn informed and shaped anti-colonial struggles within India. The Komagata Maru incident, which became a rallying point for the diaspora nationalist Ghadar Party’s attempts to spark revolution in India, revolved around the turning away of a shipload of working class migrants from India headed to Canada. While the Ghadar Party never managed to raise sufficient popular support for revolution within India, the Komagata Maru incident is remembered in independent India as part of the nationalist struggle.
Prior to the Modi years, Indian governments by and large continued with this understanding. The diaspora — irrespective of caste, class, religion or region — was seen as representative of, and entwined with, the nation itself. For example, bringing back 170,000 predominantly working class migrants stuck in Kuwait during the Gulf War in 1990 was an uncomplicated matter of national pride.
The Modi government’s relationship with the diaspora is much more fragmented and complex. The diaspora is no longer seen as a passive and homogenous cultural extension of the country. Specific groups, such as the upper caste Hindu diaspora, which the Modi government sees as points of access to Western power, have been actively courted, while others have been actively antagonised. The Sikh diaspora, including a large number of working class Sikhs, is derisively branded “Khalistani” in the Indian media. And despite Modi’s Hindu unity push in India, the Indian government has also targeted members of the diaspora involved in enacting anti-caste discrimination legislation in the U.S. In addition, members of the diaspora who have been critical of the Modi government have been refused admittance into the country or had their Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) cards cancelled.
On the deportations, the Modi government, which appears to be modelling its foreign policy almost solely on the views of the section of the diaspora they actively court, has been happy to stay silent on the demonisation of the deportees and reassert the distinction between “legal” and “illegal” immigration.
This general indifference of the Indian government to the treatment of the deportees is yet another example of a troubling trend — the protection Indians abroad can expect from their government now seems dependent on the class (and usually caste) location they occupy and their relative utility to the government. While the evacuation of relatively well-to-do students stuck in Ukraine was seen as a top priority for the government, an achievement worthy of being put into electoral advertisements, the families of 126 working class Indian nationals tricked into enlisting in the Russian army have had to make multiple appeals over the years for them to be rescued. Twelve of them have died fighting (the last in January) and 18 still remain stuck in combat.
This apathy has tied in neatly with the moral decay of the public discourse in India. The empathy of the modern Indian middle class is, in general, reserved for people they see as akin. Two stampedes in the last month have barely sparked any outrage. Major railway accidents no longer lead to demands for resignations. Acts of public violence involving the humiliation of oppressed castes and Muslims are commonplace, and no longer make the mainstream news.
Once the traditional framework that equated the treatment of any Indian abroad with the dignity of nation as a whole was disbanded — as it has been in the Modi years with the constant fragmentation of the diaspora along the lines of religion or amorphous allegations of “anti- India” activities — most Indians appear to be willing to cast the treatment of deportees into the same general bucket of indifference otherwise reserved for the treatment of the marginalised in India.
The malaise goes beyond foreign policy. The rabid public discourse of the last 15 years – which has been completely devoid of principles and filled with appreciation of any brute majoritarian tactic, as long as it is successful – has left us unable, as a people, to value our own dignity or even recognise when it is taken away from us.
Sarayu Pani is a lawyer by training and posts on X @sarayupani.
Missing Link is her new column on the social aspects of the events that move India.
