The great irony of an editorial published in a national daily on August 15, 2024, is noted in Sanjay Baru’s recent book, The Secession of the Successful: The Flight Out of New India. This editorial recommended the creation of a ministry of emigration: “With their birth rates going down and population growing older, labour shortages in developed countries offer India’s large young population a great opportunity.” The irony is, of course, the very articulation of this argument on the anniversary of the nation’s liberation from the imperialism of a developed country.
The standard defence of this argument is that inward remittances by overseas Indians constitute a significant gain for the Indian economy. But the reality of these remittances, “a pittance” next to the full scale of diaspora income, immediately busts this myth. But who cares about reality in India if the rhetoric is inflated enough? When Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses an audience of successful diasporic Indians as the ‘Rashtradoots of Indian heritage’, they feel fulfilled, driven by the sentimental idea of India held commonly by global Indians. Not that their sentiments prevented them from taking their wealth and talent far away from the reality of the nation. The India that lives in India, meanwhile, remains a lower-middle-income country. It is impossible to pretend that the global flight of its talented, empowered, and wealthy population has nothing to do with the actual status of the country.
“A nation is the same people living in the same place” — the Jewish-Irishman, Leopold Bloom, in James Joyce’s Ulysses, told the unnamed “Citizen”, a figure representing a rabid and racist variety of chauvinistic Irish nationalism that saw no place for the Jew. Bloom is Joyce’s figure for an inclusive Ireland against what the novelist worried was the ethnic chauvinism of anti-colonial Irish nationalism. Joyce’s cosmopolitan idealism is naïve indeed. When has any nation been just about the people physically living there? A three-month stay in Hungary this summer pointed me to the excluded and the oppressed status of Roma gypsies in that country — they have lived forever in Hungary — along with elsewhere in Europe where long-term residents now face unprecedented hostility based on their ethnicity, religion and, most damagingly, their lack of economic agency.
Naturally, we don’t need to look overseas for this, or, for that matter, to the history or literature of other cultures. In today’s India, this is all around us — nowhere more intensively, at the moment, in the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls in poll-bound Bihar and, potentially, for a number of states that are looking at impending assembly elections. The kind of documentation required, in keeping with the ongoing project of demographic control by our Central government, while keeping religious identity in mind, ultimately ends up excluding the poorest and the most marginalised members of society — those with the least wherewithal in terms of money or education. Essentially, unless you have a modicum of both, you cannot belong to a place anymore. It turns out neither can you move to another one.
Both mobility and situatedness have always been tied to privilege. Such is the difference between immigration and displacement, the expatriate and the refugee. It is probably as old as the modern nation-state itself. This linkage took on damaging proportions in early-20th-century Europe through the force of anti-Semitism, and its historical irony in light of what’s happening in Gaza now has not been missed by any. But it seems like this relationship between mobility/situatedness and poverty/marginalisation is now an official policy with an increasing number of nations. That the right to migrate once had a humanitarian angle is almost a relic of history — in Asia, Europe, and America alike.
At a time when hostilities against poor, ‘inadequately’ documented immigrants from governments and chauvinistic nationalists attain a vindictive urgency, the number and variety of ‘Golden Visas’ offered to the wealthy reaches an all-time high. As nations purge themselves of the poor and the vulnerable, they sell their citizenship to the highest bidders. My American friends report with horror the presence of military tanks in town squares of major cities and the chilling violence — social, psychological and material — of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents against the poorest and the most vulnerable people who aspire to be, or in some instances already are, part of what used to be a great site of democracy, aspiration, and immigration. This happens exactly while President Donald Trump multiplies the existing fee for the H1-B visa nearly six times to make it $100,000 and offers the $1 million Gold Card for individuals, the $2 million corporate Gold Card, and the $5 million Platinum Card, all varieties of the investor visa with quick and easy paths to permanent residency’: “It’s called THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. THE WAITING LIST IS NOW OPEN.”
The Statue of Liberty, the “Mother of Exiles” in Emma Lazarus’s poem, called out: “Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.” The poem was written in 1883, and no one should be naïve enough to expect that a nation’s character, self-image, or even its needs would remain identical through history. But in the humiliating aftermath of planes of illegal immigrants from villages in Punjab, Haryana and Gujarat being returned from the US to India, starved and shackled in military planes, the exodus of high net worth individuals to the West and shiny stretches across the Gulf and Southeast Asia makes for an Indian remake of “Mother of Exiles”. What will it be called? “Mother of Expats, Stepmother of Exiles?” “I keep my tired, my poor/ My huddled masses and smother them all/ Take my rich, my smart, my seeker of more/ Folks ever-ready to answer your call?”
One has to be blind not to notice the flight of talent, notably in scientific research, from the US in this anti-intellectual, anti-scientific regime. But while they take up jobs at a third of their salaries in Europe or join the Great Wave of China, scarcely anyone looks India-ward. Meanwhile, India carries out its own anti-immigrant drive, purging the poor from Gurgaon, Bihar and Mumbai alike, driven by its own ethnic chauvinism to shape a violent and unproductive demography that only answers to the electoral roll call of its Ruler.
Saikat Majumdar’s most recent books are The Remains of the Body and The Amateur
