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COMMENTARY
Flawed bid to woo overseas
Indians
By Praful Bidwai
NEW
DELHI - Devoid of imaginative strategies to revive
flagging economic growth, the Indian government is
looking for shortcuts, this time by wooing investment
from its own Diaspora, consisting of 20 million people
scattered in some 130 countries.
But its moves
to entice persons of Indian origin, including its
proposal to offer dual citizenship to those from a
"select" group of countries, has drawn flak.
Earlier this month, the government organized a
three-day extravaganza in New Delhi to felicitate people
of Indian origin, hundreds of whom were invited to a
sumptuous spread of conferences and state banquets, with
virtually the entire cabinet of the government of Indian
Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in attendance.
The festivities were launched on January 9 to
mark the day that Mahatma Gandhi returned to India from
South Africa in 1910. The irony of the choice of date is
that few overseas Indians, especially the 4.5
million-strong minority of affluent professionals living
in rich countries, has the remotest inclination to
return to India. Yet it is this very group on which the
government concentrated all its energies.
In the
process, it has created new rifts and attracted the
accusation that it is practicing "dollar and pound
apartheid" - pampering persons of Indian origin from
North America and Britain and other industrialized
countries, while treating the more numerous groups of
Indians settled elsewhere with disdain and contempt.
The government is inspired by the example of
China and the large contribution that people of Chinese
origin make to foreign direct investment (FDI) flows
into that country. Their share in FDI - itself in the
order of US$35 billion to $40 billion a year and last
year exceeded $50 billion - is estimated at 60 to 80
percent.
But persons of Indian origin have
proved different. They account for about 9 percent of
FDI flows into India and at best make speculative
portfolio investment of "hot money" in the country.
They are greatly differentiated and highly
heterogeneous. They comprise four distinct groups. First
and oldest are those who were drafted as indentured or
quasi-slave labor in the 19th century and dispatched to
other colonies of the British and Dutch empire, such as
Mauritius, Fiji, Malaysia, Surinam, Guyana, Trinidad and
South Africa. Many of them remain relatively poor.
The second group consists of the million-plus
Indians who migrated to Britain in the last century,
some through East Africa - mostly shopkeepers,
blue-collar workers and postal clerks. This group is
upwardly mobile, but has had to struggle hard to be
granted civil and political rights and a proper identity
in the country of their adoption.
The third
group comprises emigrants to the Persian Gulf after the
oil price boom of 1973. These are largely unskilled and
semi-skilled workers or artisans with a modest income
but without full residency rights.
The fourth
group consists of affluent professionals and businessmen
who migrated to the United States, Canada and Western
Europe from the mid-1960s onwards. This group is
socially conservative. It is acquiring considerable
economic and political clout, especially in the US,
where it is the single wealthiest minority, richer than
even the Japanese.
It is on this last group that
the Vajpayee government lavished praise as "catalysts of
change". And it is to them that it is offering dual
citizenship.
This group can claim credit for
many success stories and some genuine achievements.
Nobel Prize winners Amartya Sen and V S Naipaul and rich
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are examples. But these
achievements are not residence-specific, and have not
catalyzed change inside India.
Persons of Indian
origin overseas have a schizophrenic attitude to India.
On the one hand, they are culturally close to the
country and emotional about their links. On the other,
this affinity rarely translates into a tangible
commitment.
Those from the affluent countries
possess enormous wealth. They account for the bulk of
the overseas Indian community's collective annual income
of $160 billion, almost half of India's GDP. But they
account for a mere 9 percent of total investment flows
into India, and only 4 percent of foreign direct
investment.
By contrast, humble Gulf-based
workers remit four times more money. Without this,
India's economy could not have survived the oil shocks
of the 1970s.
Affluent overseas Indians invest
in India out of the profit motive, not patriotism. Take
Lakshmi N Mittal, the world's second largest steel
producer and its richest person of Indian origin. He
says, "The government should not look at $50 billion
from non-residents, it should look at $500 billion from
multinational companies. I don't think any non-resident
would invest because of emotional attachment. They want
returns - I love my country - but I must get returns as
well."
In 1990-91, overseas Indians suddenly
withdrew $1.5 billion from Indian banks, plunging the
Indian economy into a crisis.
However, it is the
dual citizenship issue that is proving most contentious.
Citizenship is not about passports, residence or even
emotional bonds. It is about participating in the life
of the nation. Citizenship is not a bargain over
investment. It makes no democratic sense to grant it to
people who do not live in the country.
Why does
the Vajpayee government so pamper overseas Indians from
industrialized countries? The answer is the
national-chauvinist politics of the Hindu right-wing
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which heads the ruling
coalition. This strikes a chord among conservative
overseas Indians - American and British of Indian origin
are the BJP's principal source of funds too.
The
link has been documented most recently by the Campaign
to Stop Funding Hate. It traces donations collected by a
BJP front, India Development and Relief Fund (IDRF),
from US companies such as the computer software giant
Cisco and Apple Computer, and diverted to finance
violent activities in Gujarat state, which in early 2002
witnessed a pogrom of Muslims. Cisco has since
apologized for having donated money to the IDRF.
The BJP is pursuing a parochial agenda. It
congratulates overseas Indians who occupy public
positions, but drums up xenophobia when that suits it
politically. It has run a hysterical campaign against
opposition Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi, focused
on her Italian origins - ignoring the fact that she has
voluntarily chosen to adopt India as her home. Legally,
she is on a par with Indians born here. Thanks to such
inconsistencies, the BJP is bringing discredit on
itself.
(Inter Press Service)
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