This is a peculiar election season for Indian citizens living overseas. Booming economic opportunities mean that there are more of us than ever before in history. Thanks to advances in telecommunications, we’re also more plugged into events back home than previous generations of expatriates. This increased awareness amidst greater numerical strength feeds a sense of political alienation from the events back home, spurring influential Indians living abroad to call for the extension of voting rights to the expatriate community.

The justification for this claim is not easily dismissed: given that so many Indian citizens now live abroad and yet remain culturally rooted in India, it is only fair that they should share in the right to choose their government. Mere geographical dislocation ought not to be a reason for the disenfranchisement of citizens. Further, those who support the expansion of voting rights to Indians abroad cite examples of other countries which have done the same for their overseas citizens — member countries of the European Union and the United States of America among them. A true democracy, it is argued, should not bar its citizens from voting on trivial grounds.

There are good reasons of principle, however, as to why Indian citizens living abroad should not be allowed to vote. Firstly, for better or worse, India’s political system is based on local representation. Citizens only get a direct say in determining who represents their constituency as a member of parliament, a member of the legislative assembly, and so on, in descending order of granularity. How the rest of the government is constituted — who becomes prime minister, what the cabinet looks like, how the president is elected, and so on — is a decision for the parties which come to power to make. The people are only indirectly implicated in the process of constituting the government, and if they are dissatisfied with this, their primary mode of redressal is to vote their favoured candidates out of power the next time around. Voters are not required to think of the greater good of the country when casting their vote (though this is a desirable civic quality), they are only expected to vote for the candidate they think would best represent their interests.

The representatives of the people, on the other hand, are made accountable both to the people of India as a whole (as a collective) and to the members of their constituencies (as individual representatives). This is the peculiar genius of the Westminster system: it requires macro-governance and micro-governance at the same time. Now, extending the right to vote to Indians living abroad disrupts the principle of local representation underlying the Indian electoral system. No matter how well-informed an Indian living abroad is about the events in her constituency, she is situated in a different context from her counterpart back home. While the overseas Indian reads or hears about the political situation in Calcutta, the resident Calcuttan lives it. The fact that resident voters are more connected to the political reality in their constituency raises two implications for the exercise of voting rights: the local resident is likely to be better informed about the problems of her constituency than her counterpart living overseas, and she is also more deserving of representation since those problems are more immediate for her.

In relation to the first implication, expats, no matter how well-informed they may be, are necessarily limited to secondhand information about their constituencies back home. The diversity of views and sources of information available to the resident, views not necessarily expressed in newspaper editorials, blogs and other forms of globally accessible media, make them likely to be better informed about the conditions of life in the constituency. Thus, when residents vote, they perform their roles as engaged and informed citizens. Expatriates, by virtue of their greater distance and reliance upon secondhand news, cannot be informed to the same degree. To allow them to vote from this position of necessary ignorance would amount to a devaluation of the norm of active citizenship which, at least in theory, underlies the design of the Indian democratic system.

From the second implication of the differing contexts in which the expat and the resident live their lives, we can see that the political needs of the resident are very distinct from those of the expat. Residents, quite obviously, are subject entirely to the demands and the authority of the Indian State. Their political grievances can only be redressed by the Indian State, through its various forms and agencies. To them, therefore, the vote is an essential means of ensuring that their views are heard, their interests represented.

This is not true of expats, however. Their daily lives are not mediated to the same degree by the Indian State. The sources of their most immediate political grievances are likely not to lie within the Indian State, but rather in the countries in which they reside as foreign nationals. To allow expats to vote as members of the constituencies to which they belonged while they were in India thus does violence to the notion of local representation. It allows those whose existence is far less dependent on the government of India to get an equal say in the political decisionmaking process with those who have no option but to depend on the Indian State. Yet, the Indian State does not interfere in the day-to-day existence of the Indian expat in the way it does with the resident, and it is for this reason that local representation remains the most effective way to ensure democratic self-government in the Indian political context.

There is another, more abstract, reason for voting rights to remain confined to resident Indians. The right to vote is one of the most fundamental aspects of civic life, it is nearly central to the meaning of citizenship in a democracy. While many political privileges have been extended to overseas citizens in the past, this is the one right which has remained unavailable to them. This is rightly so, for the right to vote is the benefit which one derives from being an engaged citizen of India. It is the reward one receives, in addition to the ability to hold constitutional office and be a member of the government, for contributing to public life within India.

This is not to deny, of course, the significance of the contributions overseas citizens have made, and continue to make, to the development of India. However, the options available to overseas citizens for enriching civic life in India are far more limited, and usually (though not exclusively) revolve around economic contributions. Resident Indians, on the other hand, contribute economically, socially, and culturally to making India what it is. They do not split their civic identity with another political group (like “Indian-Americans” for example), nor do other national entities make demands on their efforts (an Indian living in Calcutta is not governed by the American Constitution, whereas an Indian living in New York is). Their contributions go, first and foremost, towards Indian society. Everything they do, therefore, is ultimately bound by the Indian State, and the claims the State makes on them are wholly unique.

It is for this reason that resident Indians, and they alone, should be given the right to determine who governs them. Self-government has a whole different meaning, and is a more pressing need, for them than for citizens living abroad. It is only fair that its rewards, too, should flow to them rather than to their overseas counterparts.