“The unresolved issue with the NRIs is that the Indian government just does not know what it can do with them. The government wants their money, no doubt, and they are indeed sending money home, which accounts for 3 per cent of India’s GDP, according to the World Bank. The BJP’s foreign policy notion that the NRIs are its soldiers abroad to spread national glory is at best a delusion. And it could become a dangerous one if Indians abroad are seen as ‘fifth columnists’. Most NRIs have no interest in Indian politics nor are they motivated to push India’s case across the world. A time has to come when Indians need not migrate to other countries for better opportunities.”

The NRIs remittances are higher than the foreign direct investment (FDI) that India is able to attract. The NRI remittances to India were $89.4 billion in 2021 and $100 billion in 2022.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in its pursuit of overzealous nationalism, has looked upon the Indian diaspora across the world as an extension of India, politically as well as culturally. During the tenure of the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, an attempt was made to woo overseas Indians, with the PM making it a point to interact with the Indians abroad rather than with other citizens of the host country. It was in 2002 that the first Pravasi Bharatiya Divas event was held in New Delhi.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi intensified the outreach to the NRIs by addressing rallies in Madison Square Garden (New York) and then in Sydney after his party’s historic win in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. But despite the enthusiasm to cultivate the NRI constituency in the past two decades, there is uncertainty and confusion over how to tap the potential of the NRIs to strengthen India at the global level or even at home.

The 17th Pravasi Bharatiya Divas event, held in Indore from January 8 to 10, reflected the confusion. The Indian government does not seem to be keen that the Indians living abroad should come back and help in the development of the country with the knowledge and expertise they have acquired abroad. It only wants that the NRIs invest in India. But it is in many ways a non sequitur.

Indians settled abroad, whether in the Gulf countries, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia or Singapore, have been sending money home to their families. But they have not thought that it is profitable to do business in India or invest in India. Even today, the NRIs remittances are higher than the foreign direct investment (FDI) that India is able to attract. The NRI remittances to India were $89.4 billion in 2021 and $100 billion in 2022, higher than what the Chinese and Filipino emigrants send to their home countries.

So, at successive conventions of the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, the country’s leaders of the day give rhetorical messages to the few thousand delegates who attend the event. And this year seems to have been no different. PM Modi, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Education and Entrepreneurship Minister Dharmendra Pradhan delivered homilies and the unintended ironies were there for all to see. PM Modi, in his inaugural speech on January 8, said, “In Pravasi Bhartiyas, we see myriad images of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam and Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat,” and “Pravasi Bhartiyas echo the voice of a powerful and capable India.”

Pradhan said, “We all agree that once upon a time India was a ‘Vishwaguru’, not in terms of military power but in terms of intellect.” And then he turned to the government’s programme of creating a skilled network in the country. He told the NRIs that India has a skilled workforce of 500 million. Sitharaman, echoing PM Modi’s statement of how cheap India’s Mars mission was, said, “The cost of the Chandrayaan, which goes to the moon, is far less than that of a Hollywood film.” And citing a NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service Companies) report, she said Indian IT companies hired 2 lakh Americans at an average salary of $1,06,360 in 2021.

These statements can only confuse NRIs. The government wants to woo them by telling them how good India has become since they left the country and what an attractive investment destination it is now. Surely, the NRIs would want to test the government’s claims on the ground and it will be reflected in the investment decisions they will make in the future.

But there is also the fact that though Indians in the US are sending home more money than those in the Gulf countries, as was the case earlier, the Indian-Americans are less likely to return home and even start businesses in India. The Indians in Gulf countries will come back at some point of time because as yet there is no possibility of becoming citizens in those countries. In contrast, more Indians are getting the coveted Green Card in the US and they are more likely to become citizens there. Secondly, there are more billionaires in India than among the NRIs. Steel magnate Laxmi Narayan Mittal and metal magnate Anil Agarwal are among the exceptions. The NRIs in the US are prosperous but they are not super-rich yet. They do not have surplus capital to pump into India like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

It is, however, true that more and more Indians in western countries are becoming part of the political mainstream of their adopted countries, and they are reaching positions of influence and power. Whether it is Indian-origin leaders such as US Vice-President Kamala Harris, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, President of Guyana Mohamed Irfaan Ali or President of Suriname Chandrikapersad Santokhi (the last two were special guests at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas event in Indore), they owe nothing to India, and there is nothing that India can do to support or strengthen them. India is not the imperial power that the Modi government would imagine itself to be.

The unresolved issue with the NRIs is that the Indian government just does not know what it can do with them. The government wants their money, no doubt, and they are indeed sending money home, which accounts for 3 per cent of India’s GDP, according to the World Bank. The BJP’s foreign policy notion that the NRIs are its soldiers abroad to spread national glory is at best a delusion. And it could become a dangerous one if Indians abroad are seen as ‘fifth columnists’. Most NRIs have no interest in Indian politics nor are they motivated to push India’s case across the world. A time has to come when Indians need not migrate to other countries for better opportunities.

(The author is a senior journalist)