The Indian Diaspora as an Instrument of Foreign Policy, and Its Limits

India's diaspora, estimated at over thirty-two million people spread across nearly every country in the world, sends home remittances exceeding one hundred billion dollars annually, more than any other country receives, a flow that has been macroeconomically significant for India's balance of payments for decades and has grown even as the composition of the diaspora shifted from predominantly Gulf-based labour migration toward a larger and increasingly influential professional class concentrated in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Singapore. Successive Indian governments have moved from treating this diaspora as a source of remittance income and periodic goodwill to treating it explicitly as an instrument of foreign policy, formalised through the Ministry of External Affairs's own diaspora engagement programmes, the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas celebrations begun in 2003, and prime ministerial addresses to large diaspora gatherings in stadiums from Houston to Sydney that have become a signature feature of India's international diplomacy over the past decade.

The Real Dividends

The dividends from this strategy have been genuine, and nowhere more visibly than in the United States, where Indian-Americans, numbering around 4.4 million and among the most educated and highest-earning ethnic communities in the country, have built political influence disproportionate to their numbers, evident in the growing size of the Congressional India Caucus, the prominence of Indian-American politicians including a sitting vice president of Indian descent through the 2020-2024 term, and the role Indian-American professional and business networks have played in advocating for closer US-India ties on issues from the 2008 civil nuclear agreement, where diaspora lobbying reportedly played a meaningful role in building congressional support, to more recent technology and defence cooperation initiatives. Beyond politics, diaspora capital and expertise have flowed back into India through venture investment, philanthropic giving to Indian institutions, and a return migration of entrepreneurs and executives that has meaningfully shaped India's technology and startup sectors.

Where the Strategy Runs Into Trouble

But treating a diaspora as a controllable instrument of state policy runs into an inherent contradiction that has become harder to manage as diaspora communities have grown more established and more politically assertive in their countries of residence. Diaspora communities are, first and foremost, citizens or long-term residents of other sovereign states, with their own legal obligations, political interests and internal diversity that often does not align neatly with the messaging Indian diplomacy would prefer them to carry. The Sikh diaspora in Canada and, to a lesser extent, the United States and United Kingdom, has produced sustained political friction precisely because a segment of that community's political activity, around the Khalistan movement, is treated by the Indian government as a serious security and sovereignty concern while being viewed by the host governments as protected political expression under their own constitutional frameworks, a gap in legal and political frameworks that has proven very difficult to bridge diplomatically.

The Canada Crisis as a Cautionary Tale

This tension became acute in 2023 when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau alleged in Parliament that Indian government agents were linked to the killing of a Khalistani activist, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, on Canadian soil, an allegation India has denied while diplomatic relations between the two countries deteriorated sharply, including expulsions of diplomats on both sides. A related case in the United States, where federal prosecutors brought charges in 2023 and 2024 alleging a foiled plot linked to an Indian government employee to assassinate another Khalistani activist on American soil, drew a notably different Indian response, with New Delhi setting up its own inquiry committee and engaging more cooperatively with American investigators, a contrast that itself suggests Indian diplomacy recognises the far higher strategic cost of a rupture with Washington compared to Ottawa. Whatever the eventual factual findings in these cases, and they remain contested, the episodes illustrate a broader risk: when diaspora engagement shades from cultural and economic outreach into activities that host governments interpret as extraterritorial state action against their own residents or citizens, the diplomatic cost can be severe and can undermine the very soft power the diaspora relationship was meant to build.

A More Complicated Community Than the Narrative Allows

There is also a subtler risk in the diaspora-as-instrument framing: it tends to flatten a genuinely diverse set of communities, with real internal disagreements over Indian domestic politics, religious identity and regional origin, into a single voting or lobbying bloc assumed to share the interests and views of the Indian state. Diaspora surveys, including periodic polling of Indian-American political attitudes conducted by American research institutions, consistently show a community more politically divided and more critical of certain Indian government policies, particularly around religious minority rights and press freedom, than the celebratory framing of stadium rallies would suggest, a gap that Indian diplomacy sometimes seems reluctant to acknowledge in its public messaging even though it shapes how the community actually engages with Indian issues in practice.

Toward a More Realistic Framework

None of this argues against diaspora engagement, which remains a genuine and valuable instrument that few other countries can deploy at India's scale, but it does argue for a more realistic framework that distinguishes cultural, economic and educational engagement, which carries little diplomatic risk and considerable upside, from any activity that could be construed as directing diaspora political behaviour or, more seriously, conducting security operations against diaspora members on foreign soil, which carries risks disproportionate to any conceivable benefit. India's diplomatic relationships with Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom are all, in different ways, more valuable than any individual security concern related to diaspora extremist elements, troubling as those elements are, and Indian foreign policy will serve its own broader interests better by drawing that distinction clearly and consistently rather than allowing ambiguity about it to periodically detonate relationships that have taken decades to build.