India’s Tale of Two Diasporas

As leaders of some of the most influential countries descended in New Delhi to participate in the G-20 summit last week, a leading politician of the Indian opposition arrived in Europe to talk about India’s descent into majoritarianism. Rahul Gandhi, a scion of the Congress party whose father, grandmother, and great-grandfather were India’s prime ministers, began his four-nation tour last week in Brussels, where he said at a press conference that India’s democratic institutions were “under attack from the group of people who are running India.”

Gandhi delivered a similar message earlier this year at both Cambridge and Stanford universities. But his trip to continental Europe offered his first opportunity to communicate his fears about the subversion of Indian democracy to a group of Western legislators. The day before he met the press in Brussels, he held a roundtable meeting with lawmakers of the European Union. The EU parliamentarians were “very concerned,” Gandhi said in response to a question by Foreign Policy. “They felt there was an attempt to stifle the democratic structures of India.”

Some Indian analysts felt that Gandhi had little to achieve from such foreign trips. Hartosh Singh Bal, the executive editor of the Caravan magazine (one of the country’s few remaining independent outlets), said Gandhi should instead “roll up his sleeves and get in the thick of things at home” ahead of elections next year. But it’s no accident that Indian domestic politics is increasingly playing out on the international stage. In part, that’s due to geopolitics: As India becomes an essential ally to the West in its bid to combat climate change, counter China, and gain access to India’s growing market, Indian politicians have greater incentive to engage deeply with the rest of the world.

But that engagement is also motivated by a growing realization among Indian politicians that people residing abroad—whether members of the Indian diaspora or Western elites themselves—have a greater sway than ever before in India. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Gandhi are each trying to build their reputations among Indians residing abroad—although with different audiences in mind and with very different methods, reflective of their personalities.

Modi has projected himself as a global leader by embracing the success of the 18 million Indians living outside the country. He is the first Indian PM to have consistently met with not just big Indian entrepreneurs and intellectuals settled globally, but also thousands of everyday Indians in packed stadiums and arenas during his trips abroad.

Bal said that Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) got a boost from the diaspora, many of whom are comparatively more nationalist than Indians at home. “The diaspora has always been more right-wing than the country,” he told FP over the phone from New Delhi, noting that the diaspora has funded the BJP’s parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), since the 1990s, long before Modi became prime minister. And Modi has turned out to be the leader that both the RSS and the right-wing Indians among the diaspora were waiting for, embracing a vision of Hindu nationalism that some argue threatens India’s more liberal democratic traditions.

Gandhi, it seems, has finally taken a page out of Modi’s playbook by looking for support abroad. But rather than the Indian diaspora, he is reaching out to liberal institutions in leading Western democracies, hoping to attract elite audiences comprised of both Westerners and more liberal members of the Indian diaspora. He pitched himself as a more inclusive and democratic counterweight to Modi and someone who can be an ally against China’s hegemony over global production. He said the democracies of the United States, Europe, and India should come up with an “alternative vision,” where manufacturing is undertaken in “democratic conditions.”

But if Gandhi’s goal was to project an image of strength at home by associating with Westerners, the result may have been the opposite. The man who hopes to unseat Modi in next year’s elections did not spell out how India could replace China as a manufacturing behemoth. He has often accused Modi of a weak response to Chinese aggression in disputed areas on the India-China border but did not suggest a military alliance with the West, either. And Western experts say that leaders in Europe won’t fully embrace Gandhi until he first proves his mettle at home in general elections.

“If Rahul Gandhi or any other Congress leader could offer an effective governing alternative, then the Europeans would probably prefer that,” added Jacob Kirkegaard, senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “But if the alternative to the BJP is an ineffective, unstable governing coalition that can’t get anything through the Indian Parliament, then I think Europeans will sympathize more with Modi, someone they can do business with.”

Gandhi’s Congress is part of a 28-party alliance, abbreviated INDIA—the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance—that intends to defeat Modi’s BJP in the upcoming elections.

European Parliament member Pierre Larrouturou told FP that in July, he pushed through a resolution calling on respect for human rights to be integrated into all areas of the EU-India partnership, including trade. “It is urgent to build a partnership whose main goal is not to maximize commercial exchanges and profits,” he said, pointing out the widespread reports in Modi’s India of “shrinking space for Indian civil society and a rise in human rights abuses.” But these resolutions are nonbinding, and both the EU and the United Kingdom seem keen to ink trade agreements with India despite accusations of marginalization of minorities and undue government influence over the judiciary and the press.

In the context of global geopolitical rivalry between the United States and Europe on one side and China and Russia on the other, despite all its troubles, Indian democracy under Modi “was good enough,” Kirkegaard said. “The West is looking for allies.”

Gandhi has had less success reaching out to the Indian diaspora than Modi. Arriving more than half an hour late for his press conference in Brussels, his manager said that Gandhi had been delayed by fans, but there were no throngs of people queued outside the press club. Big international media networks were missing, and some chairs inside had been occupied by regional employees of the Congress party.

Surender Singh Parmar, a Sikh overseas worker of the Congress party, sat right behind me at the press conference. He said Gandhi was unable to attract the same crowds as Modi partly because the event was low-key, but also due to an overall decline in the party’s appeal. “The party didn’t organize the function at that level, but as you know, the graph [of Congress’s popularity] is also down,” he said. “We have to work effectively to uplift it.”

There were others in Brussels who would have liked to meet him, but they were worried about upsetting supporters of the BJP back home. A jewelry merchant based in Brussels said that he identified with Gandhi’s secular and liberal politics. “Rahul ji is educated, and he speaks of the youth—he wants to take everyone together,” the merchant told Foreign Policy. “Modi ji, I also … like him, but his ministers say all sorts of things. They talk too much about religion.”

The merchant called back an hour later and asked for his name and identity to be obscured. “If you say anything against the BJP then people are ready to kill you, but you can do anything about Congress and they never threaten or attack,” he said. “You know, I keep going back to India and I don’t want trouble with BJP supporters, so please don’t use my name.”

Hindu nationalist politics have spilled over to other parts of the world, too, with riots reported in an erstwhile quiet community of South Asian Hindus and Muslims in Leicester in the United Kingdom, most of them ethnically Indian. In Australia, an Indian man who attacked Sikh men for protesting against Modi’s farm reform laws was given a hero’s welcome by a group affiliated with the BJP when he was deported back to India. The group said the man had been falsely implicated by Sikh separatists.

Gandhi was raised to lead India, but for now, he doesn’t have the same appeal as Modi—not at home nor among the diaspora.