Why Do Indians Flee India?

Rajiv Desai holds degrees in engineering, journalism and political science. He has worked for multinationals that include Citibank, Pepsi, Boeing, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco and Ford.

By Rajiv Desai, SikhSpectrum.com Monthly, Issue No.10, March 2003

Jhumpa Lahiri, a woman of Indian descent, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Manoj Night Shyamalan, a man of Indian origin, won an Oscar nomination for his film, The Sixth Sense. Indians in the Silicon Valley are feted around their world for their incredible success in the information technology businesses. Kalpana Chawla from a small town in Haryana became the first woman of Indian descent to become a US astronaut. Amartya Sen won the coveted Nobel Prize for Economics for his work at Harvard University.

With all these high accolades accruing to individuals of Indian descent just in the past couple of years, Indians could be forgiven for thinking that the turn of the millennium was a special time for their kind. A quiet pride at the Indian connection of these accomplished individuals is justifiable.

However, these singular achievements by men and women of Indian origin do raise several questions about the nature of Indian society and its economic system. Why, despite a thriving democracy, do Indians leave their home to settle elsewhere? It is not as if they were running away from dictators and despots. Nor were they fleeing religious persecution. By and large, most Indians leave because of the lack of economic opportunity at home.

Since the late 1960s, thousands of bright young Indians have emigrated to become part of an exodus that came to be called the "brain drain." It is a subject close to my heart because I was among those who bailed out of India in the 1970s seeking opportunities in America.

The vast majority of us went as students and stayed on to work in American universities, hospitals and companies. Over the years, we established ourselves as first-generation immigrants, raised families, bought homes and became part of the American socioeconomic mainstream.

Despite the success we enjoyed in the United States, India remained central to our identity. Most Indians in America nurtured the thought of returning home eventually. Only a handful found their way back. The others found their way back blocked by their growing children for whom India was not the home it was to their parents. It was a foreign country. America was their home.

Their parents quickly realized that any attempt to return to India would deprive their children of growing up in their own homeland. It was a fate they had suffered and would not visit on their children.

Today, with the last hope of returning snuffed out, many are asking the question: Why did they have to leave India?

Seeking an answer to the question, I began to study the Indian diaspora in the United States. In the late 1970s, I started to write a column called "Indians in America" for a community newspaper of which I was founder-editor.

Talking to Indians in all walks of life in America, I became convinced that the key factor in the emigration of middle-class youth was the ideology propagated by the ruling elite in India.

Even three decades after Independence, India's ruling class kept alive the fear of Western colonial domination.

Thus, India turned its back on foreign trade and investment, pursuing instead a quixotic, inward-looking vision in which the government commanded the heights of the economy and Indian society.

When the privilegentsia rule

Over the years, the country came to be held in thrall by a government-anointed nexus of bureaucrats, politicians, academicians and businessmen, the so-called "privilegentsia." Under this dispensation, connections counted for more than achievement, privilege more than performance. For ordinary middle-class families, with no strings to pull, there were simply no opportunities to make a decent and dignified living.

Instead, the dead hand of government stifled the entrepreneurial instincts of the people. Both agriculture and industry declined and India came to be regarded as an economic basket case.

By 1967, India's very food security came under threat as famine stalked the land. About that time, many bright men and women from middle-class families began to flee.

The initial trickle became a torrent in the decade that followed. Meanwhile, India's economy deteriorated rapidly and with it, the fabric of Indian society began to fray. Civil strife and war took their toll. Opportunities declined even further and the "privilegentsia" tightened its stranglehold on the body politic.

India's "privilegentsia raj" weakened with the declining economy and political unrest through the 1980s.

In the early 1990s, a bankrupt government was forced to loosen control on the economy. As foreign investment flooded in and international trade increased, the Indian economy experienced an unprecedented boom. With the advent of satellite and cable television, Indian society began to change in irreversible ways. The "privilegentsia's" grip began to loosen to where today the nexus of bureaucrats, politicians, academics and businessmen has lost its authority and seeks to re-establish its hold in authoritarian ways.

Chief among those ways is the brazen attempt to whip up jingoism in recent years. This began with the opposition to foreign investment in the consumer sector, which was remarkable for the slogan "India needs computer chips not potato chips." The denouement of the process came with the nuclear explosions set off at Pokharan in in May 1998 and a year later, the military skirmish with Pakistan in the Kargil hills of Kashmir.

The costs were incalculable in terms of international opprobrium that followed Pokharan and the uncounted casualties in Kargil. More recently, the "privilegentsia" sought to appropriate the accolades showered on individuals of Indian origin in the US and elsewhere. Tub-thumping nationalism replaced rational public debate as the ruling regime wrapped itself in the flag.

Today, as the wave of crude nationalism begins to recede in the face of severe problems of governance and finance, the "privilegentsia" is up to its old tricks again. This time, it seeks to revive jingoism by projecting Indian as a "beauty superpower." This is with reference to the rash of "Miss World" and "Miss Universe" awards that have come the way of Indian contestants at mindless beauty pageants that are made for television and commercial endorsements.

Meanwhile, Indian foreign policy is reduced to disputes with OECD members about visas for Indian computer programmers, who are shipped to the Silicon Valley and elsewhere, much like indentured labor of earlier times, to perform mindless tasks for Western firms at a fraction of the cost of local employees.

On the other hand, domestic policy is exercised by such weighty issues as match-fixing and illegal betting on cricket, a game with which India's millions are obsessed. At the same time, the real issues of governance such as water, power, roads, pollution, jobs, fiscal deficits, subsidies and the privatization of the parasitical public sector are caught up in the familiar political battles over turf and spoils.

The "privilegentsia" does not give up that easily. It will try to hold on to its power as long as possible, never mind the country and its pressing problems.