Don Pacifico was a Gibraltar-born Italian Jewish businessman and former Portuguese consul in Athens when a Greek mob vandalized his house. He sought British protection (Gibraltar being British), and Lord Palmerston, Britain's foreign secretary, sent the Royal Navy to seize Greek ships off Piraeus. That is history's most famous instance of a government intervening in another country on a private individual's behalf.
Narendra Modi's telephone call to Malcolm Turnbull, Australia's prime minister, might be bracketed - qualitatively at least - with that ultimate in gunboat diplomacy. The 29-year-old Manmeet Alisher, who moved to Australia in 2009 on a student visa and was working as a bus driver in Brisbane when he was so cruelly murdered, was granted Australian citizenship a year ago. He was, therefore, even less Modi's responsibility than Don Pacifico was Palmerston's. If Turnbull responded, it was because he sets some store by India-Australia relations and because Australia's reputation is at stake. Human-rights activists spoke of more than 100 such attacks during 2009-11 when protests and demonstrations in India obliged Manmohan Singh to do on June 1, 2009, what Modi did on October 30, 2016: he telephoned Australia's prime minister, then Kevin Rudd, to express his disquiet.
While barbaric outrages in a supposedly civilized society cannot go unremarked, there is a no less compelling need for New Delhi to review the entire question of responding to happenings concerning people who can vaguely be described as Indian. The laudable concern that prompted Arvind Kejriwal to tweet "Indian Govt must ensure safety of Indians abroad" is a somewhat tall order. India's diaspora numbers anything from 16 to 25 million, perhaps more, and with the best will in the world a government that cannot guarantee the safety of its citizens under its very nose in the capital can hardly take on responsibility for a dispersed and diverse global community. India's reach is more limited than our rulers like to think. Some expatriates have no links with, or interest in, the Republic of India. Geopolitical alterations have robbed others of any sense of belonging. A distinguished Sylheti in Singapore used to say his ancestral district had been part of both India and Pakistan but Bangladesh was an unfamiliar entity and he didn't have a word of Bengali.
Matters were simpler (and more honest) in Jawaharlal Nehru's time when someone who had migrated to better his prospects was thought to have surrendered his claim to his parent country's protection. Nehru made an exception of South Africa but, otherwise, urged emigrants to make their peace with wherever they had settled down. That particular brand of pragmatism is no longer possible not because India has gone soft or become more caring but because of an even harder pragmatism. Overseas Indians are now worth their weight in gold. The World Bank's Migration and Development Brief last year showed that despite a 2.1 per cent decrease, India's remittances of $68.9 billion topped the global list. Given the almost prescriptive patriotism of those who have chosen exile for pecuniary reasons, expatriates are also a source of financial and cultural succour to many ruling parties, including India's.
The internet complaint, when the World Bank report appeared, that despite this indebtedness, non-resident Indians still don't have the vote wasn't quite logical. India's biggest debt is not to the highly articulate, suited and booted, high-flying, internationally acclaimed business magnates, computer whiz kids, peers of the realm, award-winning academics and prize writers who throng the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas's annual junkets. They trot the globe, live in countries of their choice and invest where they like. Not so the pitiful thousands of labourers in Southeast and West Asia who account for the bulk of foreign exchange remittances. Upgrading of Persons of Indian Origin to Overseas Citizens of India or relaxing visa rules means little to them. They are not interested in Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Awards. They are forced to return after a stipulated number of years in Malaysia or Saudi Arabia. Only the prospect of eventually being able to buy some comfort in the native village sustains them during their harsh working lives.
Inder Kumar Gujral's visit to conquered Kuwait to start the rescue operation for more than 170,000 Indian workers is still criticized. But his generous action must be contrasted with the nightmare two years earlier when Singapore rounded up illegal immigrants to be jailed, whipped and sent back. Thailand's prime minister, Chatichai Choonhavan, threatened to send warships to Singapore, the Thai ambassador appeared on television to appeal to his countrymen, and Bangkok quickly repatriated nearly a thousand illegals. India didn't bat an eyelid. The high commissioner, Yogesh Mohan Tiwari, claimed he knew nothing about any illegals until the Singapore government released the 88 letters it had sent to him and which he had ignored. Local Indians donated money and material, helped to set up tents in the mission compound, bought and served food and attended to the needs of nearly 2,000 penniless immigrants from India who were sent back.
Regardless of the law, our politicians and bureaucrats would have fallen over each other to help if a Lalit Suri or a Vijay Mallya had been involved. Indian differentiation dies hard. As a member of one of the lesser committees connected with Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, I once suggested recognizing the work of a non-government organization that had highlighted the horrendous plight of Indian labourers in Dubai. The South Block mandarins on the committee preferred to give the credit to India's consulate there. The diplomats manning it were of their caste. It's an old story. An ethnic Chinese historian recorded that the founders of the Indian Association in colonial Malaya "were generally divorced from the Indian working class who were predominantly Tamil ... The majority were illiterate or semi-literate labourers emasculated by years of paternalistic supervision by the government, the employers, and the agents of the Indian government".
Singapore's Indian Association didn't welcome them either. "Some said that if the labourers were admitted, they would come half-naked to the meetings. Others were reluctant to mix freely with the 'lower orders' as the coolies were referred to." That was in the 1930s and 1940s. A belated reaction surfaced in 2007 when a Malaysian human-rights lawyer filed a $4 trillion suit against the British government for atrocities Indians who had been taken to Malaya as indentured labourers suffered. The "colossal" damages reflected "the years of pain, suffering, humiliation, discrimination and continuous colonisation".
The pain continues because migration and contract labour do. To India's shame, it means that despite the bombast of our prime ministers, this country cannot provide jobs at home for its children. Forced to export manpower, it looks the other way while criminal operators fleece the poor and ignorant, and make perilous illegal or semi-legal travel arrangements. The student visa on which the hapless Alisher went to Australia is one of the commonest tricks of the trade. Similar rackets led to scandalous exposures and closures in Britain. Nothing could have been more sadly revealing than the disclosure by a spokesperson of the Indian community in Queensland that the Australian government would be asked to grant either citizenship or permanent residence to the dead Manmeet's brother. The reason given was that being in Australia would enable him to follow up the police investigation into his brother's murder. Any excuse suffices. It's like the Pole in the Iron Curtain era who applied for a passport. Asked for a reason, he said he wanted to attend Ronald Reagan's funeral. When the Warsaw official pointed out that Reagan wasn't dead, the applicant replied he would rather wait for the event in the United States of America.
Migrants who want to eat their cake and have it don't merit priority consideration. But Indian workers abroad deserve much more care and attention than they now seem to receive.
