How the world’s largest diasporaand a rising motherland rediscovered each other.
On an evening this July, 30,000 people filled Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium to welcome Narendra Modi, with Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, in attendance. Two evenings later, a sold-out Spark Arena in Auckland received him on the first visit by an Indian Prime Minister to New Zealand since Rajiv Gandhi’s in 1986. These encounters are the latest in an arc that opened at Madison Square Garden in 2014 and has run through Wembley, Houston, and Sydney, each arena filled by a community he calls a “living bridge” to its homeland; the crowds now come, city after city, to celebrate the new India and claim their share in its making. The constituency that fills those arenas appears on no map, yet it is India’s most consequential external relationship: the more than 35 million Indians and persons of Indian origin across every continent, the largest diaspora any country has sent into the world. We mark its foundational moment each 9 January, the day in 1915 when Mohandas Gandhi stepped ashore at Bombay after two decades in South Africa, the returning pravasi who would remake the nation.
The anniversary anchors Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, and carries a truth India has taken a century to absorb: the journey outward and the journey home are the same journey. I spent my diplomatic life watching nations weigh one another, and few reappraisals have been as swift or as complete as the one between India and its diaspora, where two gazes have changed at once: the overseas Indian looks back at the motherland with a pride that has displaced the old ambivalence, while India looks out at its emigrants with a sense of partnership where there was once only the lament of brain drain. Why both gazes turned, and what their meeting makes possible, is India’s rise told from its least examined angle. What equipped this diaspora to succeed is, at bottom, what India gave it. It left home carrying the habits of a competitive, plural, argumentative society: reverence for education, fluency in English, ease amid diversity, the discipline of family and community, adaptability and an instinct for enterprise sharpened by scarcity.
Those endowments compounded abroad because the diaspora integrated without dissolving, mastering the grammar of its adopted societies while keeping its temples, festivals, languages, and kitchens. Indians left India; India declined to leave them. History supplies the proof. The colonial empire shipped Indians into indenture across the sugar colonies, 60,553 to Fiji alone between 1879 and 1916, and the descendants of those Girmitiyas now govern the lands their forebears reached in servitude: Navin Ramgoolam is Prime Minister of Mauritius, Kamla Persad-Bissessar of Trinidad and Tobago, and Mohamed Irfaan Ali is President of Guyana. The later, chosen migrations have their own summit: Tharman Shanmugaratnam holds Singapore’s presidency, and António Costa, a Goan overseas citizen of India, presides over the European Council. The corporate summit is now just as commanding. By Indiaspora’s 2024 count, 16 Fortune 500 companies, with combined revenues near $1 trillion, are led by chief executives of Indian origin: Sundar Pichai at Alphabet, Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Arvind Krishna at IBM. Indra Nooyi was the first woman of colour and immigrant to head a Fortune 500 company; Leena Nair moved from Unilever to Chanel, whose global chief executive she has been since 2022; and this January, Mumbai-born Shailesh Jejurikar became Procter & Gamble’s first chief executive of Indian origin since its founding in 1837, adding the chairmanship this month. No other emigrant community spans indentured labour and Nobel Laureates within living memory as well.
The diaspora’s regard for home changed because India stopped asking the world for patience and began commanding its attention. The economy overtook Japan in 2025 to become the world’s 4th largest and will surpass Germany soon; UPI now carries 49% of the world’s realtime payment transactions; Chandrayaan-3 set down near the lunar south pole; and India’s G20 presidency seated the African Union at the table it once petitioned. Each of these arrived as something personal for the engineer in San Jose or the nurse in Dubai: the country once explained apologetically at dinner parties is now the reference point of the conversation. India’s own gaze turned when policy began treating the emigrant as an asset rather than an absence. The outreach of the Modi era has been structural rather than just sentimental: overseas citizenship now gives over 4 million card holders nearcomplete rights of residence and ownership; migration and mobility partnerships with 18 countries make movement orderly and safe; and a Prime Minister who calls overseas Indians Rashtradoots, ambassadors of the nation, wherever they gather.
The economics ratify the sentiment: remittances reached $135.4 billion in 2024-25, more than half the year’s entire foreign direct investment; 1,800 global capability centres, over half the world’s total, employ 1.9 million professionals at home; and more than 1,100 scientists have returned on re-entry fellowships. Brain drain is quietly retiring itself; circulation, return, and cocreation describe the actual traffic. The turn has acquired an unexpected tailwind. The United States now prices a new H-1B petition at $100,000 and has rebuilt its visa lottery to favour the highest salaries, and with 71% of recent approvals going to Indians, the recalibration falls hardest on them. A generation of engineers and researchers that assumed its future lay westward is weighing home, and behind it moves a quieter current of those who left decades ago and wish to retire where they began. History rarely offers a country its talent back. India should make the homecoming worth choosing, with laboratories, universities, and research chairs worthy of the returnees, and rules that receive the retiree as family rather than paperwork. There remains the most delicate role: the diaspora as India’s advocate in the councils of its adopted homes.
The Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans stands some 145 members strong, and its patient advocacy helped carry the India-United States civil nuclear agreement through a sceptical Congress in 2008. The community has also taken up the defence of the India narrative itself, answering the campaigns that grade India’s democracy down with the case that a developing nation of 1.4 billion deserves judgement on its trajectory; that needs many more voices than it has. The delicacy lies in the terms of engagement: these are citizens of their countries first, and their standing as friends of India rests on that undivided civic loyalty; India asks of them advocacy and understanding, never allegiance. A diaspora that argues for deeper partnership with India as committed Americans, Britons, or Australians serves both its flags, and is believed because it does.
The embrace carries disappointments on both sides, and India’s are spoken softly but felt widely. Beyond the remittance to its own kin, the diaspora returns less to the mother country than its wealth would allow, its lobbying episodic and its direct investment a fraction of what it sends home, and it divides along lines of region, community, and ideology that dilute the voice its numbers promise. The comparison that stings is China’s: through the reform decades the overseas Chinese financed the majority of China’s foreign direct investment, while the Indian diaspora’s share of India’s remains marginal, an agenda for introspection on both shores. Its presence in global media and on platforms such as Meta tells India’s story less often, and less faithfully, than its strength there could carry.. Indian origin voices are used to malign India or fuel Hindu -phobia in Western media , universities and think tanks funded by countries who would not want India’s democratic model to shine or succeed .
The diaspora keeps its own ledger, its first entry that India does not do enough in return: it celebrates its pravasis more readily than it serves them, its overseas citizenship stops short of full belonging, and its channels for giving and investing remain narrower than the sentiment pressing to use them. Both shores have watched centres of India and South Asia studies, many endowed by diaspora generosity and even funded by the Government of India, foster anti-India narratives that re-hyphenate India with Pakistan or devalue India’s civilizational preeminence, question its strong democratic credentials and its legitimate quest to be a leading power and developed country by 2047. These are disappointments of intimacy rather than distance, and naming them and correcting them is part of the relationship’s coming of age. Gandhi came home in 1915 because the making of the nation required his presence. A century on, that requirement has dissolved. Those who remain abroad build India daily, through remittance and investment, through science and enterprise, and through the standing their achievement lends the Tricolour under other skies, while a developed India by 2047 names them partners in its making. The passage back to India no longer needs a ship; the two gazes have met, and the meeting is the homecoming.
*Lakshmi Puri is former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and former Deputy Executive Director of UN Women.
