Why the Indian diaspora despises India

Suhani Sharma, a 25-year-old woman from Fiji, is back after a long holiday in India. She had a fun-filled experience, having visited 2000-year old forts, massive temples, and prodigious IT complexes. Her verdict about the rapidly growing country: “I don’t care for India at all.” Queried about why she had such strong feelings towards the country, Suhani couldn’t give a coherent reply except that she had a disconnect with India.

Aruna Nair is a 30-something communications professional from Malaysia. Last year she had a run-in with an Indian colleague when he demanded why she was constantly putting down India in front of her other colleagues. “I feel India is a disgusting place, and I’m entitled to my opinion,” she says. Interestingly, Aruna gained her bachelor’s degree in India because college quotas for ethnic Malays leave few seats for ethnic Indians and Chinese.

India is the original home of around 25 million diaspora people worldwide but the parent country is increasingly seen as a villain in the eyes of its offspring. Diaspora Indians will not state this openly but the reality is they are extremely unhappy with the way India has ignored them over the past decades.

Fiji is of course the classic example. Many Fijian Indians feel India looked the other way when the native islanders were trammelling over their rights. In 1987, the year of the first coup that toppled an Indian-majority government, there were rumours in Fiji that New Delhi would despatch a naval flotilla to the Pacific to help the Indian population. The non-arrival of the fleet caused considerable bitterness towards India.

The reality, however, is that India was hardly in a position to help Fiji. Today, the Indian Navy is a mighty long-range force but two decades ago, it could hardly have sailed into the Pacific without being ticked off by the Americans.

Still, New Delhi could have issued a threat to the Fijian government of grave long-term reprisals, which would have surely prevented violence against Indians. It could also have used the Commonwealth to safeguard its legitimate interests in Fiji.

There are potential Fijis in other parts of the world such a Suriname, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago. The Caribbean country of Suriname has a population of 500,000 of which 37 per cent are of Indian origin. Formerly known as Dutch Guyana, it is now being called “Chinese Guyana”, as more than 40,000 immigrants and thousands of illegal visitors from China have swamped the country, threatening to make it a de facto Chinese colony. New Delhi is blissfully unaware of this development.

Next door in Guyana, the Indian majority enjoys some stability but the African minority with encouragement from the US, UK and Canada has been clamouring for imposing African hegemony. Declassified American papers reveal that in the sixties the CIA was planning a coup with Britain if Indian origin leader Cheddi Jagan won the elections.

In 2008 when violence erupted between Africans and Indians, investigations revealed that African gangs with backing from their political leaders had decided to murder one Indian a day as a long-term strategy to reduce Indian advantage in numbers.

Similarly, in Trinidad, which has ample oil and mineral resources, and is an Indian majority nation, the Africans through pressure tactics are getting most of the jobs, loans and contracts.

A report by a University of Essex professor says, “Most Indians want a state in which cultural pluralism will be an accepted norm, in which they can be Guyanese or Trinidadian and Indian. Africans tend to acknowledge only one cultural standard as congruent with Guyanese or Trinidadian identity, and also do not accept the legitimacy of a continued uniquely Indian identity. The two groups share the same state, but have very different conceptions of the nation.”

In Malaysia, a sizeable diaspora has seen with dismay New Delhi ignore the vicious violence unleashed by the Malaysian government against the Indian community. When peaceful Malaysian Indian pro-democracy activists of the HINDRAF were being tortured in Malaysian jails, Shashi Tharoor, who was junior Indian foreign minister and later quit after being caught in a scam, said it was an internal matter where India could nothing.

“We extended our full help to the fledgling Indian National Army when it was fighting the British in the 1940’s, and this is how India repays us,” says an angry Malaysian.

The angst in other diaspora communities is just as deep.

Perhaps the lone exception is Mauritius. Back in the 1960s, 90 per cent of its population comprising Indians and Africans was ruled by a 3 per cent French elite. It is to the credit of former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi that she offered full support to the Indians who were consequently able to kick out the French colonialists and establish an Indian dominated government.

Indira had nerves of steel but most Indian politicians lack even a backbone, so expecting them to do anything bold is unrealistic. The passion that Indian people have for supporting the diaspora worldwide is entirely missing in the political leadership. Also, when the politicians do little for Indians in India, what is the chance they will care about Indians outside?

But where the government failed, the diaspora bodies have filled the gap. In 2004, when Fiji nominated Sitiveni Rabuka, a former coup leader who later became prime minister, as its ambassador to the US, the Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin campaigned against his appointment by taking up the matter with the US President, US Secretary of State and other American agencies for the rejection of the nomination. Rabuka never got the job.

(About the author: Rakesh Krishnan Simha is a features writer at New Zealand’s leading media house. He has previously worked with Businessworld, India Today and Hindustan Times, and was news editor with the Financial Express.)