Waiting Game: Non-resident power

Just weeks after his speech at New York’s Madison Square Garden, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s high-octane engagement with the Indian diaspora continues in Australia.

Early in 2015, Mr Modi is expected to visit Canada and the United Kingdom. Large events involving the non-resident Indian/persons of Indian origin (NRI/PIO) community can be expected.

The mobilisation of and vigorous interaction with the diaspora has come to be recognised as a pillar of the emerging Modi foreign policy.

Mr Modi’s motivations are immediate and individual. The implications of his renewal of relations between the Government of India and its formal diplomatic structure on the one hand and the diaspora on the other can, however, only be sustained if such a process becomes institutionalised and sustainable, beyond the term of Mr Modi. In short, how quickly and with what response mechanism in New Delhi can the goodwill and euphoria for Mr Modi become a constituency and lobby for India?

To be fair it may not be possible to answer that question satisfactorily for some years. Even so, a clue may emerge from what Mr Modi tried to achieve in New York and what he is attempting to replicate in Australia and perhaps Britain, continental Europe and Canada in the near future.

The diaspora in America has been a big support for Mr Modi in the past few years. As such, Mr Modi’s rousing address to the diaspora in New York or indeed the planned speech in Sydney on November 17 can be seen as both a thanksgiving as well as a force projection.

In New York, the big crowd and the bringing together of American politicians and members of Congress who waited for and flanked Mr Modi on stage was a sort of “shock and awe” message to Washington, DC, about the mesmerising impact the new Indian Prime Minister has had on voters in India, about his goodwill and possible influence on Americans of Indian origin, and about his potential (or India’s potential) to put together an effective lobby in the US and what opportunities and challenges this lobby would present to American politicians and policy-makers.

Perhaps similar thoughts will touch Australian politicians. In the UK, both David Cameron and Ed Miliband are predicted to promise stronger ties with Mr Modi while wooing Indian community voters in the run up to the general election.

A sample of this came at a recent Labour Party Diwali event at which  Mr Miliband, the party candidate for Prime Minister, was present.

An ethnic Indian speaker and Labour Party functionary ended his speech with two phrases. Referring to the May 2015 general election he said: “Achhe din aane walen hain” and “Abki baar, Miliband sarkar”.

The crowd went rapturous, chanting “Modi, Modi, Modi…” Labour veterans on the dais were taken aback by the intensity.

There are several issues packed into those preceding examples. It is not as if the America-based diaspora has never been tapped. It emerged as a key lobby group for India in 2007-08, when the India-US nuclear deal was being discussed in Washington, DC, and awaited Congressional approval.

In those heady days, the power and impact of the Indian community, the ability of well-connected doctors and technology tycoons to work the phones and speak to individual senators, was compared to the influence of the Irish and Polish lobbies, and even spoken of as having the capacity to replicate the multidimensional Israeli constituency in America.

That early promise frittered away because the India story went sour and because the UPA government was not sufficiently excited by the prospect of a diaspora lobby. Politically, it did not make as much sense for a Sonia Gandhi or a Manmohan Singh as it does for a Narendra Modi.

Further, the ministry of external affairs continues to be sceptical about diaspora engagement. At the very least, there is no institutional position and responses are very dependent on what individual diplomats and ambassadors think.

Some foreign service officers see value, others feel the cost of diaspora mobilisation is too high. After all, there is no one undifferentiated diaspora. There are individuals who are genuinely influential, useful and committed to building relations between their countries and India.

There are also individuals who are pushy noise-makers and thrust themselves as interlocutors without the necessary connections and weight either in New Delhi or the capital of the country they live in.

That aside, the utility of the diaspora will vary from country to country. For example, America and Australia are both societies built by migrants, but while the Indian community has acquired a certain socio-economic heft in the US, this process is still in its early stages down under, where large-scale Indian immigration is a more recent occurrence.

Also Washington, DC, is used to political lobby groups that are rooted in national, regional or religious identities. In Australian politics, this phenomenon is not as public and as formalised.

These are all issues for Mr Modi and his advisors to mull over. For a start, he needs to put together a task force to assess how to use the Indian diaspora. The previous time this was done was by the L.M. Singhvi Committee, which submitted its report in January 2002. Those findings now need updating.

From a number count, any study of the Indian diaspora has to turn qualitative. It needs to map the diaspora’s influence, resources and potential as a diplomatic force multiplier in specific economies and polities. In the end, India will need not one diaspora strategy but several diaspora strategies, depending on context and geography.

The writer can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com