Accidentally Developmental: How State Fragmentation enabled India’s Diaspora Policy

• In Event: Soft Power, Hard Borders: The Geopolitics of Diaspora Engagement

Abstract

Recent scholarship has shown that developing states are increasingly crafting migration policies with the aim of fostering national developmental goals. India under the Modi premiership has been at the forefront of this trend, with the world’s largest and wealthiest diaspora population and greatest share of global remittances, despite a long history of official state policy neglecting the diaspora. How was India able to pivot so rapidly to a more liberal, developmental migration regime when it is otherwise marred by state fragmentation and low institutional capacity–characteristics which famously thwarted its industrial developmental policies? This paper draws on new historical evidence to show that the BJP’s diaspora policy derives from earlier iterations of the Indian State’s engagement with the diaspora under Congress regimes. This is a radical revision of current accounts of India’s diaspora policy, which all index liberal economic reform as the point at which the State became more open to engaging the diaspora. Most accounts of the BJP’s post-2014 rise credit Modi for an about-face in India’s diaspora policy: an embrace into the fold of the nation, compared to decades of indifference institutionalized under Nehruvian rule. Against this scholarship, I show that, despite appearing to ignore its diaspora due to its policy of nonalignment, two contradictory diaspora policies developed and co-existed: first, how the Nehruvian non-interventionist position came to be institutionalized on the “front stage” of global politics, and then how a strategic, more welcoming policy developed unspoken on the back stage towards its diaspora in the Global North, supported by the Indian Foreign Service bureaucracy. The very fragmentation that hampered effective state coordination of industrial policy allowed for the survival of a developmental migration policy regime in spite of official policy commitments to the contrary.

Author

• Nisarg Mehta, University of Chicago