Towards an Indian Century?

The Chinese working in the knitting factories of Prato attract more attention than the Indian laborers of the Pontine Fields or the Sikh cheese makers in Emilia. Nevertheless, the two diasporas, Chinese and Indian, are equivalent in size: Sinolandia and Indolandia number fifty to sixty million each. Chinatowns on five continents are remembered – and travel guides designate them with an asterisk – but those few lines ignore the now more numerous and crowded Indiatowns. Perhaps the reason is that the Sinosphere is now consolidated, even in the collective imagination, from the poor coolies who laid their hands in the British colonies of Hong Kong and Singapore, to the workers who built the First Transcontinental Railroad that connected the two American coasts 150 years ago, and the Indian one more recently, except for the spice traders and plantation farmers of East Africa.

Nevertheless, we should no longer be surprised not only by the geopolitical, economic, and human dimensions achieved by India in the 21st century. Take what can be considered the crown jewel of the Indian diaspora in the United States, which has grown from 0.5 to 1.5 percent of the population in twenty years. And it is the one that captures the highest level of education and economic success. It is a phenomenon that is still poorly understood, but reveals the trajectories that the world we live in is traveling. Between one of the poorest countries in the world and the most developed country, an extraordinary process based on selection, assimilation, and entrepreneurship is taking place that is unprecedented if only in its speed: there has been European emigration to the USA for a century and, with a few exceptions, it started from the lowest rungs of the social ladder. Anyone who wants to know more can refer to an interesting book by Indians Ching, Kapoor, and Chakravorty: The Other One Percent: Indians in America. To cite just one fact, more than four million Indians in America have a median income of $120,000 each…

The last time Indian Prime Minister Modi visited the USA, in September this year, to meet President Biden and attend the Quartet leaders’ summit in Washington, he found himself among his countrymen: after addressing the UN General Assembly on Long Island, he met 13,000 Indians who praised him.

Successful Indians from Palo Alto, from Silicon Valley, where they form the largest community of foreign investors, enough to remember that 8 percent of the founders of high-tech companies in the United States are Indian, are well known to Time and Newsweek newspapers: from Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichar, to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, from Adobe Systems CEO Ghantanl Narayen, to IBM President and CEO Arvind Krishnai. But also, PEPSICo CEO Indra Nooyi, Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan, Mastercard CEO Ajoy Banga, Vanity Fair Editor-in-Chief Radhika Jones, CEO of one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world Novartis Vasant Narasimhan, CEO of Deloitte Punit Renjen.

This is not to say that there are not enough Indians in the apparatus of American politics. Two examples for everyone: American White House candidate, Senator and Vice President Kamala Harris, born in California to Jamaican and Indian parents, educated at Howard University, the great black elite university in Washington, DC, and Nimrata Randhawa, known as Nikki, married to Haley, who has long opposed Trump’s nomination from the Republican Party in 2024, after serving as ambassador to the United Nations in his first term, was born in South Carolina to Sikh Indian parents.

Perhaps a more valuable topic for readers of Pluralia’s Opinions is geostrategy, and it is one in which members of the diaspora vividly express themselves. And here the first that comes to mind is Parag Khanna, a very successful publicist, an American born in Kanpur, India, who graduated from the London School of Economics and Georgetown University in Washington. Khanna wrote a very successful book at the end of the most acute phase of the coronavirus pandemic: Move: The Forces Uprooting Us, which speaks to accelerating forces that are changing the profile of the entire world, from political cataclysms to labor shortages, technological development, and climate change. The second is Fareed Zakaria, educated at Berkeley, Yale, and Harvard, CNN commentator, Time columnist, listed as one of the world’s top one hundred geostrategists by Foreign Affairs magazine, also born in Mumbai, India, author of The Post-American World. The thesis of his book is that, thanks to the United States spreading democratic values, market economy, and technology, other powers, starting with China and India, are joining it in an increasingly multipolar and less “Washington-centered” policy. But this is just the tip of the iceberg: those who are not visible are the hundreds of thousands of managers, computer scientists, university professors, and administrators who are at the core of what remains the American dream for them every day and who contribute to it.

Looking elsewhere, starting in the Gulf, there are more than eight million Indian expatriates, including 3.8 in the Emirates – the first community with 40 percent of the total population, the fourth diaspora after America, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia – and 2.5 million in Saudi Arabia. Here, too, the traditional core of tradesmen and workers with low levels of education is increasingly being replaced by an elite with leading roles in finance, health care, transportation, and services. Nor can we forget India’s centuries-old presence in East Africa.

However, we should also look closer to home. For example, in Europe.

If Indians in Italy – some 200,000 – represent a hard-working and law-abiding community, albeit a recent one, not everyone knows that Germany’s first non-European expatriate community in terms of personal income consists no longer of Turks but of Indians. According to sociologist Amrita Datat, this is because young people emigrating to the West “have decades of professional life ahead of them, they are overambitious, highly educated, and therefore large companies are competing for them.” Consequently, it’s no longer just labor force….

What about Indians in the UK, the country of which they have long been a colony and from which they have now acquired, among other things, the Jaguar and Land Rover brands? According to the Center for Policy Exchange Research, the two million Indians living in the United Kingdom, three percent of the total population, of whom 700,000 live in London, the largest Asian ethnic group, are the most integrated, given the parameters of income, property, education (here they are second to the Chinese) and are more socially active, have wide friendships outside their ethnic group, much better off than their Pakistani and Bangladeshi cousins.

In the UK, as in the USA, success stories have multiplied since the turn of the century, especially post-Brexit: for example, more than 250,000 Indians have settled in the UK in 2023 alone. There are success stories even in the food service industry: nine thousand Indian restaurants, seven of which have at least one Michelin star. The era when, jokingly, anyone asking for an Indian address was answered “follow the smell” is over: today curry is as appreciated in London as it is in Madras, as evidenced by the two million Britons who eat it every week in an Indian restaurant and the three million who cook Indian spice-based food at home at least once a week… What’s more, success ranges from music to literature to politics with former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

Thus, according to the Indiaspora website, there are more than two hundred Indian diaspora leaders worldwide, including eight presidents and prime ministers and 65 ministerial-level politicians. Among them I would add Sikh Ajay Banga, appointed by Biden to be World Bank president in September 2023, after having been president of Exor, and previously Mastercard and a board member of Dow Chemical and the World Davos Economic Forum.

Indians at home are no different. The so-called global Indians are now known all over the world: from Lakshami Mittal, CEO of Arcelor Mittal, to Yusuf Hamided, president of pharmaceutical giant Cipla; from Anand Mahindra, CEO of a similar industrial conglomerate operating in a hundred countries who bought Pininfarina body shop, to Ratan Tata, recently deceased head of a huge multinational corporation that acquired, among others, Air India and revamped its fleet with an order of 470 new aircraft; from multi-billionaire and the richest man in Asia and the eleventh richest in the world, Mukes Ambani, president and CEO of the Reliance Group, which operates in telecommunications, media, and petrochemicals, to Gautam Adani, the founder of the eponymous company, one of the largest port companies in the world. But it’s not just big industrial and financial conglomerates that are based in Mumbai: Bollywood also has the same address. And its glitter does not overshadow the seriousness of the academic journey of many of its most celebrated actors, from the legendary Shas Rukh Khan to Amitabh Bachchan, a doctoral candidate at Queensland College in Australia, to the beautiful Parineti Chopra with a triple degree from the University of Manchester in business, finance, and economics.

We got distracted for a moment, and India flew out of our hands, intending to think of it as a perpetually poor and submissive country or as a reflector of the light of Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa. We have spent too much time on the pages of social news and newspapers, reading reports on the lavish Indian weddings that are increasingly being celebrated in Italy as well, without paying enough attention to the financial and geopolitical pages.

So, what is the reason for India’s success? It is not enough to say that the best children of this vast continent excel in math, physics, science, speak English, and are cheerful. The difference lies in education, which is the real added value of every Indian family that intends to provide a future for their children. There’s a lot invested there, just like in the USA, often everything, just like in China, to offer them better opportunities. Few people know, for example, that India’s twenty-five technological institutes are among the world’s leading academic institutions, capable of competing with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston and creating “ready-for-use” cutting-edge technologies at home and abroad. However, those who emigrate – thousands every year – certainly represent added value to an already rich diaspora, but are a brain drain for the country that trained them. A problem we know well in Italy…