Brains down the drain

Just after joining the Statesman in London in 1960, I wrote an article on the many young Indians who were forced to stay on in Britain after completing their studies because, they complained, their job applications to Indian employers all bounced back. Though it was more than half a century ago, I well remember the paper’s apposite headline for my article: “The unreturning are becoming the unwanted”.

But no longer. The unreturning are now being wooed to return. Apparently, they are responding too. A joint report by the World Economic Forum and the Boston Consulting Group says 32,000 second-generation Indians born in the United States or Europe came home in 2006. Now, there’s a trickle back of the well-educated and well-placed people Shashi Tharoor calls Global Indians. My hope in the dying threshes of 2011 is not that the trickle will swell to a flood in the coming year but that there will be no need in future for any Indian to seek a living abroad.
I don’t mean Global Indians who boast the world is their oyster. I really mean the millions of unskilled Indians who toil in the Persian Gulf or are lumped in Singapore and Malaysia with Thais, Filipinos, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans as “foreign workers”. Not all are illiterate labourers. I have met qualified lawyers and trained technicians among them because job prospects at home are so dismal. I retreated into shameful silence when a Chinese Singaporean asked, “How can India claim superpower aspirations when your young men come all this way to huddle together in squalid dormitories and slave away on building sites for wages we wouldn’t ever accept?” I didn’t dare tell him that conditions are so bleak where those men come from that they sell or mortgage everything to bribe dalals to find them these jobs and square things with the emigration people.
Conditions were worse in neighbouring Malaysia where at dawn one day the police rounded up nearly 300 Indian software professionals. They were handcuffed, made to kneel in the police station car park, slapped, kicked and deprived of their passports and papers. They might have fared worse but for the spirited intervention of Veena Sikri, then India’s high commissioner. Usually, senior diplomats prefer not to know. Workers are beyond their notice.
More than three million Indian workers live and work in piteous conditions in the Gulf. They are often victims of ruthless employment agencies who are hand in glove with corrupt immigration officials. A common abuse was to omit the Emigration Clearance stamp from their passports and then hold them to ransom for breaking the law. The $4-5 billion those men send back is the biggest single repatriated amount.
There is little qualitative difference between a governor-general, a Nobel laureate and those sweating labourers in the blazing heat of a West or Southeast Asian building site. Each testifies to the inadequacy of Indian society. Most are driven by poverty, though some Global Indians may also complain of unsatisfactory study or research facilities here and insufficient scope for their particular discipline. A few may prefer a Western ambience or have been invited to stay in Britain or the US. But it’s the push factor that counts for most white-collar immigrants.
The recession in the West might force some of them back — Vivek Wadhwa, a BusinessWeek columnist who teaches at Duke University, speculated in 2009 that more than 100,000 Indians would return in the next three to five years — but that’s another matter. If they fulfil Mr Wadhwa’s prediction, it will be because the US doesn’t want them or because of the glass ceiling or racism. Not for love of India.
Nor can Global Indians who make enough money abroad to retire to India as elderly Brits once retired to Spain’s Costa del Sol be counted. The Brits chose Spain because the pound sterling went much further than the Spanish peseta until the euro changed things. The 32,000 second-generation Indians may be a bit like them for, being without direct experience of this country, they are influenced by the cost benefit, albeit reinforced by inherited sentiment. A teacher I know who has returned to India after 30 years in England says he lives comfortably here on the weekly social security payment that the British government gives everyone over 65. He doesn’t need to touch his academic pension or personal savings.
Global Indians don’t always find it easy to adjust to Indian conditions. Stay-at-home Indians find it equally difficult to adjust to them. A lawyer tells me he has stopped accepting NRI clients because they expect everything to be completed yesterday. He is particularly scathing about Indians who go abroad from modest lower-middle-class homes and come back inflated with money power. He calls them “Mr Kohli”, after the rich, crass, clumsy and ostentatiously Americanised Indian in Gurinder Chadha’s film Bride and Prejudice.
Of course, many others try to be useful. Some doctors have given up good jobs in Britain to set up sophisticated medical centres here; some businessmen from the US give generously to social work projects. But their generosity doesn’t mean India is shining or rising or resurgent. On the contrary, such help wouldn’t be needed if India were truly mahan.
It’s the labourers who worry me most. It’s demeaning for India to have to export manpower to balance the budget, and it’s criminal to leave them at the mercy of exploitative foreign employers and unsympathetic foreign governments. The message is that if Indians can be kicked around, so can India. The two can’t be separated. My prayer for 2012 is that it will mark the beginning of the end of this national disgrace.

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author