What do chained Indian deportees – undocumented workers expelled from the United States – returning home often after mistreatment and forced hunger spells say about the government of India?
Some returning Sikhs were forced to take off their turbans, hustled in US military aircraft, leaving the United States shortly before the Indian PM himself left for India in his own plane after meeting Donald Trump. What does this return in chains say about the state of India, which forces its young to embark on such large-scale dangerous migration in the first place and then about claims of India’s leadership ‘in the world’?
It is no surprise that in the past few years, the numbers of Indians desperate to move out at any cost and head for the US has grown to its highest level. Pew and the Center for Migration Studies of New York say undocumented Indians numbered 700,000 in 2022, making them the third-largest group after Mexico and El Salvador.
The number of Indian undocumented migrant returnees were very high between 2023 and 2024, but the peak was in 2020 with 2,300 deportations. In 2023, 41,330 of the 67, 391 undocumented Indians in the US, were Gujaratis.
The three US military planes that dropped Indians back to India offer us a lens to the India that the undocumented are desperate to flee, and about its leaders today.
Crashing economy
No jobs, declining rural wages, a massively regressive tax system, have ensured an overall sorry state of the economy. This is further underlined by indices like falling consumption levels. The RBI’s consumer confidence survey distinctly betrays shaky and falling confidence over price rise, spending patterns and job prospects. Sentiments over price rise are negative and this is the case across income groups, across society. The latest mood of the nation survey, a C-Voter enterprise finds 57% of the respondents saying that the country’s economy is either going to get worse or remain the same in the next six months. Also, more than three-fourths of those surveyed (64%) have said that they find it difficult to manage their daily expenses compared to last year. This, also shows up in falling consumer demand with bank loans going to meet routine expenses.
Over half, or 51% of those surveyed say that big business has benefitted the most from the government’s policies since 2014. A sense that there is no fair deal with economic policies has taken firm root, with almost half of those surveyed (49%) saying that the Modi government is supporting the controversial Adani group amid allegations of bribery by a US court. For some years now, the amount of money as tax that the government gets, is markedly less, as a proportion, than the tax that big corporates are asked to pay.
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‘Ab ki baar Trump Sarkar’
The images of chained Indians, accounts of them being beaten and kept hungry for days in the US, despite engagement at the highest level, gives away the pecking order of where India stands in the Trumpian world. Modi’s readiness to concede everything has shown up the drastic fall in the place that India commands, globally. Other smaller countries have stood up for their citizens, notably when on January 26, 2025, Columbian President Gustavo Petro refused to allow the two C-17 military transport aircraft carrying Colombian undocumented nationals back from the US. Trump had then announced that he would impose 25% customs duties on imports from Colombia. But after Pedro sent his presidential aircraft to bring back his people, Trump suspended his tariff threats in a statement.
In sharp contrast, India has tried to make common cause about ‘illegal immigration’. The craven ‘MEGA’ coined by Modi to chime with Trump’s MAGA, is not only misplaced, and contestable, but reflective of the sheer inability of Modi’s India to project power, either as a ‘middle’ power or as an alternative leader of the Global Majority. The Modi government has mounted a shameful defence of the US policy of chaining people when deported. India’s deflections on ‘agents’ taking people out of India and trying to be seen as in the Trump camp, have yielded little and Trump has disdainfully continued to threaten tariff hikes against India.
India’s shocking silence on Trump’s disastrous proposal to turn Gaza into an American “riviera” – when the entire world has condemned this plan to ethnically cleanse Palestinian land – has also not yielded any benefits to India, and only raised eyebrows and suspicion. India has offered many more concessions than are beneficial to it under any calculation. It has dropped the idea of de-dollarisation, earlier championed as a part BRICS, terrified of annoying Trump. It has also reportedly put on hold plans for the new e-commerce policy. The anxiety to mollify Trump has gone to the extent of agreeing to everything said, about oil or Big Tech. The chained Indians coming home are a testimony to that.
Marko Elez, a junior colleague of Elon Musk at DOGE, who wanted to “normalise Indian Hate” has got his job back and racism is being defended brazenly. Musk has said on February 8 that he will bring back Elez who had earlier resigned after it was found that he had previously made racist remarks online. Has India even spoken of this? Last seen, Modi and India’s top officials were lined up to sit across Musk, his children, nanny and another companion he got to what we are told was a business meeting.
Human (in)dignity
Modi and the BJP’s rule has been often evaluated for what it has done to strip Muslims of their dignity. Cabinet ministers, chief ministers, the rank and file has bitterly otherised them through talk of all sorts of so-called ‘jihads’, Muslims amidst references to mujra, stealing buffaloes and more. The PM had outdone everyone through elections speeches referring to Muslims in the same breath as mujra, buffalo-stealing and mangalsutra-snatching.
But what the detained Indians getting back showcase is how there is basic denial of human dignity that extends to all Indians, at least those not regarded as cronies to be protected as special. Indians killed in the stampede at the Sangam, or the New Delhi Railway Station or Indians brought back from the US in extremely deplorable conditions signal a government which is either too weak, effete or just unmindful of basic human rights and the need to preserve the dignity of all Indians.
Amitav Ghosh’s thinly-veiled fictional trilogy, The Sea of Poppies has its seeds in the girmitiyas – the history of Indians who went out to serve as indentured labour in far-flung lands. But the character Deeti, her lover and all their ship mates on the former slave ship Ibis did so at a time when India was under colonial rule and decidedly unfree. Also, Ghosh did not place even his fictional characters in chains on board the refurbished slave ship.
The government of India by not caring about its very own chained people being dropped down by a foreign military plane can pretend it is an ostrich and it cannot see, but the picture of an India shrivelled and grovelling and further trying to “normalise Indian hate” tells its own story.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
