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 Sunday, 20 July 2008 |
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Why Do Indians Flee India? |
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Written by Rajiv Desai
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Saturday, 26 April 2003 |
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.
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.
Copyright © Rajiv Desai, SikhSpectrum.com Monthly, Issue No.10, March 2003
Reprinted from http://www.sikhspectrum.com/032003/flee_india.htm
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