New York: The Indian diaspora is as complex as India itself: a kaleidoscope of religious and ethnic groups, a growing middle class, skilled labourers, poor migrants and pockets of the wealthy elite. The Indian government estimates the diaspora, including immigrants and their descendants, at 20 million, with large concentrations in 22 countries.
India has the largest number of people living outside its borders of any nation, according to the Pew Research Centre. Indian-Americans make up the third-largest Asian-American group in the United States, and lead these groups in terms of income and education.
“India has defence and economic ties with other countries,” said Tanvi Madan, director of the India Project at the Brookings Institution, but the large number of Indians living in the US “is what makes the relationship different.”
By the mid-1990s, the Indian community in the US was fairly large and rich, made up of skilled migrants of the 1960s and 1970s and young men seeking higher education in the mid-1980s, according to Ashutosh Varshney, a political scientist at Brown University.
“This diaspora was embarrassed about India’s poverty and economic performance,” he said. “There’s a diasporic desire to see India economically rise again, which also drives the fascination with Narendra Modi.”
After India’s economy was overhauled in the 1990s, its technology sector began to boom and it began approaching China’s double-digit growth rates. But the global downturn of 2008-09 laid bare its chronic problems, including antiquated infrastructure, wasteful spending and rising food prices.
“The trip provides a great opportunity to resurrect the India growth story in the West,” Soumyadeep Ghosh, a computer scientist from Princeton, wrote in his response to the Times questionnaire. “Something that would lead to better opportunities for India and its people.”
Respondents to a New York Times survey also raised concerns about resurfacing tensions with Pakistan and China’s growing might. Some also said they felt a greater connection to India because of Modi‘s election. A. Chaturvedi, 23, of Chicago wrote that it “has renewed my pride in being Indian and made me consider moving back home once again.”
