President Joe Biden with Modi on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington. Modi has tried to fuse his image to the economic and political power of Indians abroad. They voice both pride and worry in return. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
ON the final night of his visit to Washington in late June, after 15 standing ovations in Congress and an opulent White House dinner tailored to his vegetarian tastes, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India set time aside to court and be cheered by another important constituency: the Indian diaspora.
Backstage at the Kennedy Centre, as business leaders in bespoke suits and fine silk saris filtered into a 1,200-seat theatre, Modi met with a handful of entrepreneurs. Most were young, educated in India, made rich in the US, and eager to connect with the man who presents himself as a guru to the world, preaching how this is “the century of India”.
“Thank you for lifting the image and spirits of Indian Americans,” Umesh Sachdev, 37, told the prime minister, explaining that he was the founder of Uniphore, an artificial intelligence business valued at US$2.5bil, with offices in India and California. Modi tapped Sachdev’s shoulder and exclaimed “waah” or wow in Hindi.
With an emphasis on national pride, Modi and his conservative Hindu-first Bharatiya Janata Party have cultivated a surprisingly strong relationship with India’s successful diaspora. The bond has been strengthened by a global political machine, supercharged under Modi with party offices in dozens of countries and thousands of volunteers. And it has allowed Modi to fuse his own image with superstar executives and powerful, often more liberal constituencies in the US, Britain, Australia and other countries.
No other world leader seems to draw such a steady flow of diaspora welcome parties, most recently in Paris, New York and Cairo, or giant audiences, including 20,000 fans at a rally in Australia in May.
Modi was in France in July as the guest of honour at the annual Bastille Day parade, and with elections next year in India, the pattern has been set.
“The BJP leadership wants to show its strength abroad, to create strength at home,” said Sameer Lalwani, an expert on South Asia at the US Institute of Peace.
But in some corners of the diaspora, strains are emerging. Many Indian professionals who cheer when Modi boasts that India has become the world’s fifth-largest economy – who gush about new infrastructure and modern cities – also fear that his government’s Hindu-supremacist policies and growing intolerance of scrutiny will keep India from truly standing as a superpower and democratic alternative to China.
Vinod Khosla, a prominent Silicon Valley investor, who has often pushed for closer US-India relations, said India’s greatest risk is a disruption to economic growth from the instability and inequality inflamed by Hindu nationalism.
Others worry that Modi, in a bubble of political celebrity and religious certitude, is ignoring the fragility of positive momentum in a complex, diverse and volatile nation of 1.4 billion people.
“The demographics only work for India if there is progressivism and inclusion,” said Arun Subramony, a private equity banker in Washington with digital, health and other investments in India. “The party has to make an extra effort to make clear that India is for everyone.”
The bond between the diaspora and the BJP began with pragmatism – and with the first BJP prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who promoted information technology as the solution to India’s development problems in the late 1990s.
Kanwal Rekhi, the first Indian American to take a company public on the Nasdaq, heard Vajpayee’s speeches and thought: This guy gets it. He asked for a meeting and arrived in New Delhi in April 2000, leading a group called The IndUS Entrepreneurs, or TiE. Rekhi was there promising that entrepreneurship could bridge divides – India and Pakistan, Muslims and Hindus. Vajpayee welcomed their techno-utopianism.
“He asked: ‘What is your sense of India and Indians?’ Then he said, ‘Our future is very bright, and you need to show us the way,’” Rekhi said in an interview.
So began a relationship with the diaspora that reversed decades of rancour, when those who left with university degrees were seen as traitors to India’s needs.
Once Vajpayee made clear that he saw Indians overseas as guides and consultants, that is what they became.
In Silicon Valley and elsewhere, Overseas Friends of the BJP, the party’s international arm, has become an established presence.
Helping with immigration issues and other challenges, its members supplement and compete with India’s understaffed corps of around 950 foreign service officers – a fraction of the roughly 16,000 who work for the United States.
Visiting officials also bring together smaller groups for dinners and discussion. Sachdev, the Uniphore CEO, said he had gone to several such gatherings,where conversations focused on business policy more than politics. He and other attendees said they had never been asked to contribute to BJP campaigns.
But political scientists believe that the BJP and Hindu organisations draw a significant flow of money from the diaspora. In 2018, Modi’s government rushed through Parliament a law allowing Indians living abroad and foreign companies with subsidiaries in India to make undisclosed political donations. Spending on India’s 2019 campaign topped US$8bil, making it the most expensive election in the world.
Ro Khanna, co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans, who represents the district that includes the India Community Centre, said he had spoken to Modi about the importance of pluralism.
“I want us to be very much focused on strengthening the US-India relationship under the principle of India’s founding and our founding,” Khanna said, “and not a celebration of any particular individual.” — ©2023 The New York Times Company
