Since taking office in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has waged an energetic campaign to gain the support of the roughly five million Indian Americans. He has, in several speeches, urged the community to contribute money and expertise to his programmes in India. He has been keen to leverage the Indian diaspora to build political clout for himself in the US and increase monetary remittances to India.
The Indian diaspora is not homogenous and not so easy to unify. It comprises many religious, caste, linguistic and class groups. However, Modi recognised that many in these diverse groups are bound together by a powerful – but often elusive – sense of belonging and a connection to their motherland.
He shrewdly appealed to their shared love for India, tapping into a nostalgia for home and invoking a sense of pride in the land they had left behind. He tried to build coherence and unity by using this shared sense of identity as a foundation.
Things were good in the beginning. The government of India was quite efficient in streamlining processes and removing administrative hurdles enabling people of Indian origin to formally acquire what it called “overseas citizenship of India”.
But soon the rubber hit the road. While a part of...