A Fete For The Rich

As they shivered in the cold, and security officials refused to relent, the grumbling began. "All these politicians want is our dollars," shouted one delegate. "They don’t want us." Among the grumbling brigade of NRIs was Pawan Kaushik, an exporter of yarn from Taiwan, where there are an estimated 1,800 People of Indian Origin (PIOs). Pawan harangued, "On January 9, 1915, Mahatma Gandhi came back to India. Today, on January 9, we are being denied access to a conference in our honour. What’s the logic?"

Obviously, these men didn’t know India’s peculiar partiality to the privileged. One man waved a red (diplomatic) passport and was ushered inside. Howls of protests greeted this desi double standard. "Let’s break the barricade and gatecrash," a delegate from France suggested, quickly untying the rope that was the barricade. The grumbling was on its way of becoming a protest of the prodigals chafing at yet another instance of precisely what had driven them away.

Somehow, their woes reached the officials inside. One came out to usher in each and every delegate. Inside the cavernous hall, pigeons flapped overhead, seats were aplenty. "Dekhiye kitna shor machana pada iske liye (see how much we had to protest for this)," Kaushik observed grimly, settling down to listen to the prime minister. Vajpayee promised to bring in an enabling legislation for conferring dual citizenship in the forthcoming budget session. The delegates, mostly first-generation immigrants, clapped lustily at the bjp’s decision to implement its poll manifesto promise dating back to 1996.

Obviously, NRIs too have Indian roots: they began to cheer even before Vajpayee finished his sentence. He repeated the sentence, adding that dual citizenship would be applicable only to PIOs in select countries (the US, Canada, EU nations, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia). Murmurs of protest ensued. "In one stroke, we’ve divided the Indian community abroad into those settled in A class countries and those in B class countries. Those living in Africa and other places are lesser mortals. They’ll be furious. But no one wants to annoy the constituency in the UK and US where all the money is coming in to the Sangh parivar," said an observer of the jamboree.

Indeed, the L.M. Singhvi report, which went into PIO problems and expectations, doesn’t even mention PIOs in neighbouring countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. It’s as if these countries don’t have PIOs. And though Singhvi claimed his committee forwarded 160 recommendations after visiting 20 countries, there were no notable measures recommended to connect, say, to the over 2.5 million PIOs in Myanmar (5 per cent of its population), most of whom belong to the lowest economic strata. "Jahan pe Indians trouble mein hain, they are ignored. The first Pravasi Bharatiya Divas is only a party thrown for the benefit of the rich. It is brazen fund-raising," said a senior Indian diplomat.

Shortly after the prime minister left, Lord Bhikhu Parekh, professor of political theory, University of Hull, UK, cautioned the audience against "a mismatch of expectations between the country and the diaspora", that this could even "spell trouble". He said "long-distance nationalism is always dangerous", citing examples of the Israel and Khalistan experience to bolster his point.

Nor is it that teeming millions abroad are besotted by India. Says a senior diplomat who’s served in the US, "The romantic assumption that all of them are pining for India is bogus. The bulk of the guys who come do so because of party affiliations. When the PIO card was announced in 1999, they kept cribbing and very few applied. Those who applied did after calculating how much they’d save on the visa fees and even this after the fees for the PIO card was slashed from $1,000 to Rs 15,000. If there was such a large-scale demand for dual citizenship, why isn’t it reflected in the demand for PIO cards?" The Singhvi committee report says there have been only 1,200 takers for the PIO cards.

Sources also point to the problem of rejections that would bedevil the system. "Willy-nilly, rejections of applications for dual citizenship are going to cause resentment," one of them said. "Rejections will be of two types—Muslims and Sikhs settled in Southall, Toronto, etc. Those PIOs who apply and get refused will shout about it."

Government sources also complain that US-based NRIs, arguably the most pampered lot, "are punching far below their weight". The appointment of India’s first ambassador-at-large for NRIs/PIOs, Dr Bhishma K. Agnihotri, has served no national interest whatsoever. Sources say the pmo was appalled at his 2002 year-end report. "It was full of photographs of his sojourns in various countries, of his meeting with community leaders and other dignitaries without any hard analysis or recommendations," says one official.

Adds another government source, "If you ask people in New York, they would say that Agnihotri is a joke. When they set up his office, they booked a suite for him in the Lexington Hotel. It is a hotel where ambassadors and even ministers stay. But he said, ‘It is beneath my dignity’, and walked into the Waldorf Astoria. Our consulate had to pay up the money. Manhattan mein flat hai. He flies first class the world over. He is more expensive than some of the regular embassies in Europe. So patriotic is he that he is not willing to surrender his green card." This is the reason why the US government has denied Agnihotri diplomatic accreditation, much to his chagrin.

The pampering of rich NRIs is in contrast to the prevailing statistical reality: the bulk of the diaspora remittances are blue-collar contributions, precisely those whom the government has forgotten. Couldn’t last week’s do lure the rich to invest in India? "How far emotional bonds is a factor in pragmatic business investments remains to be seen, especially when the overall investment climate is cloudy," said a sceptical senior bureaucrat.

Devesh Kapur of Harvard University, and a participant in the jamboree, cautioned against giving incentives to the diaspora greater than what it is willing to give its own citizens in India. "It should not be the case that an Indian citizen has a greater probability to get recognition and concessions from her/his country of origin if (s)he leaves than if (s)he had stayed behind," he points out in the paper he was scheduled to read at the time of going to press. Kapur also argues that the treatment of minorities impacts on India’s foreign relations. "India’s experiences bear this out, especially its treatment of minorities, be it in 1984 in Delhi and more recently in Gujarat. It cannot be overemphasised that increasingly, a country’s minority living abroad will press their claim to justice not in the country of origin but in the country of settlement. In turn, this will adversely impact bilateral relations between the country of origin and the country of settlement."

Anyway, says a senior diplomatic source, a large number of people who leave India for good "do so after a bitter experience with the Indian system, convinced they have no future here. They nurse their grudges and are not in the least well-disposed towards the Government of India". It would seem New Delhi, in an ironical twist, actually celebrated the new Quit India Movement.