Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s electrifying speech to a sellout crowd of over 16,000 Indian Australians in Sydney’s grand Allphones Arena is another landmark in what is becoming a trend of shining light on India from outside the country. Like Swami Vivekananda in fin de siècle America and Subhas Chandra Bose in Germany, Singapore and Burma during World War II, Mr Modi is redefining India from abroad.
Earlier this year, Mr Modi had thrilled 18,000 Indian Americans in New York’s iconic Madison Square Garden with artistry and common touch, holding forth on what India and Indians are and how these concepts have evolved. His virtuoso performance in Sydney on November 17 carries on in this vein, wherein a grand overseas setting with cheering and excited audiences becomes the platform for reaffirming the virtues and standout qualities of the global Indian who is at home wherever she resides.
Mr Modi can of course cannily work the crowd and inspire it even in India, particularly during marquee events like Independence Day. But when he is abroad, showpiece events like Madison Square Garden and Allphones Arena are aimed at rallying persons of Indian origin (PIOs) and non-resident Indians (NRIs) as well as connecting them emotionally to resident Indians with a sense of shared pride.
That the Prime Minister is consciously attempting to revive the umbilical chord between Indians who left and those who stayed behind in India is obvious from the subject matter of speeches in New York and Sydney. He moves effortlessly between profusely heaping praise on the expats for their professional accomplishments and reminding them about their duties towards the motherland, which needs their investments, skills and lobbying acumen. He is at one go acknowledging that the PIO or NRI belongs to her adopted country and also reminding her that she is simultaneously part of a globalised family of Indians.
For the 25 million Indian diaspora spread across the planet through historic and recent patterns of migration, Mr Modi is demagogically systematising the message that the Indian government and people care and love them. Shashi Tharoor once wittily rephrased NRI as “Never Relinquished India”. But many past Indian governments failed to tap into this ingrained cultural and civilisational connection, which the Trinidadian Nobel laureate of Indian origin, V.S. Naipaul, described as “a great tenderness” for India despite all its painful facets.
From benign neglect to outright disowning of the rights and interests of PIOs and NRIs, the post-Independence Indian state tended to hold a grudge against them for abandoning India due to its poverty, infrastructural deficiencies and low quality of life. Well into the 1990s, it was commonplace conversation in India that the “brain drain” is a cause of the nation’s underdevelopment and that the NRIs are living it up by turning their backs on their brethren in India.
The Bharatiya Janata Party deserved credit for rediscovering and assuaging hurt feelings of the forsaken Indian diaspora, a process that began when Atal Behari Vajpayee was the Prime Minister, and which is now being accelerated to the next level by Mr Modi through spectacular speeches backed up by long-due reforms like merging the PIO card and the overseas citizen of India (OCI) card.
Can Mr Modi eventually succeed in attracting foreign investments from the Indian diaspora to motor the country’s economic growth? The proof of the pudding and the ultimate judgment of how successful his rousing speeches are will come if he can translate all the adrenalin and chest-thumping in New York and Sydney (London, another city with a humungous Indian diaspora, will surely get its turn for a Modi magic speech in due course) into larger volumes of inward foreign direct investment.
Political scientist Devesh Kapur has pointed out that FDI from the Chinese diaspora into China exceeds FDI from the Indian diaspora into India by a whopping ratio of 25 to 1. If one examines overall financial inflows (FDI plus remittances and portfolio investments) into China and India by their respective diasporas, the former receives only twice as much as the latter in absolute terms. In other words, remittances and foreign institutional investments (FII) dominate over FDI in the calculi of the Indian diaspora.
The reason why Indians abroad have preferred not to give back to India through the FDI route is exactly the same as to why individuals or companies worldwide hesitate to come to India. Our red tape, corruption, politicisation of land acquisition, industrial protectionism, etc. have earned a notoriety captured by the World Bank’s “Ease of Doing Business Index”, which ranks India at a sorry 140 out of 189 countries. For perspective, China is at 93rd position, ironically making it a more profitable return-on-investment proposition for the Indian diaspora than mother India!
Patriotism and self-belief whipped up through speeches are not enough to turn around the dismal image of India in the eyes of its own extended family abroad. Mr Modi tried to shift the discourse in Madison Square Garden about impressions of India as a country frozen in time where snake charmers cast spells on superstitious people. To show that contemporary India is progressing and modernising, he quipped memorably that “our ancestors played with snakes but we now play with the (computer) mouse”, and added for effect that “our youth spin the whole world around with the mouse”.
Similarly, at Allphones Arena, Mr Modi assured his doting fans that India has the energy and speed to lead the world and offer solutions to global problems. When he thundered in Sydney that “India alone has as much human resources as the whole world put together” and that India could take the place of “guru of the world”, he catered to aspirations of NRIs and PIOs so that they can hold their heads high.
Heartwarming invocations to the potential of India and the greatness achieved by expat Indians have to be buttressed by a series of policy reforms at home for “Make in India” to appeal to our diaspora. The BJP pioneered and mastered the art of harnessing financial contributions from overseas Indians for political campaigns in India, but now that it is in power, the bigger challenge is to exponentially raise amounts of FDI from the diaspora’s purses by improving India’s governance record.
The Prime Minister’s bestselling speeches have already dramatically opened the hearts of global Indians. They will sound even more breathtaking if Mr Modi walks the talk by presenting a modern state in front of the world that matches the modernity and sprightliness of India’s young population whose paeans he sings so stirringly.
The writer is a professor and dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs
