Justin Trudeau's reduced strength in Canada’s House of Commons and the spotlight this has directed on Jagmeet Singh and his New Democratic Party is a reminder that people mean power. Singh, a leftist former criminal defence lawyer who was himself a prime ministerial contender, is the first non-white leader of a federal political party. His hope that the NDP will play a "constructive and positive role" in the new parliament may well be fulfilled.
Of course, people could not be equated with power when millions of Indians wallowed in grinding poverty. In any case, the aphorism applies less to India’s 1.3 billion population than to a diaspora which proves the truth of the late Nani Palkhivala’s comment – which would be dubbed racist today – that if you take an India out of India’s stifling constraints, he can buy from a Jew and sell to a Scotsman and still make a profit. This flowering doesn’t have to be monetary. Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, India’s latest Nobel laureate, lives in the United States. So does the other Bengali economist to win the prize, Amartya Sen. Among Nobel prize winners, Har Gobind Khorana and Subrahmanyam Chandrasekhar were American citizens, while Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and V S Naipaul were British subjects.
Numbers matter more than celebrities in this context. As the Toronto Star newspaper reported during the recently-concluded nail-biting Canadian general election, "The New Democratic Party is poised to play kingmaker in a minority parliament after Jagmeet Singh spearheaded a turnaround on the federal campaign trail that may have saved his leadership and pulled his party from the brink of irrelevance." When the results were declared on October 22, Mr Trudeau's Liberal Party won 157 seats, the opposition Conservative 121, Bloc Quebecois 32, the NDP 24, Green Party 3, and there was one Independent. Mr Trudeau thus needed at least 13 legislators from his left-leaning rival parties to reach the “magic number” of 170 to form a Liberal Party-led minority government in the 338-seat house.
Not that the NDP itself has much to celebrate. Under its previous leader, Thomas Mulcair, it won 44 seats in 2015, becoming the third largest party in parliament. But despite losing nearly 50 per cent of the seats it had, the NDP is in a stronger bargaining position this time because of the performance of the other parties. No wonder Mr Singh’s celebratory speech vowed his party will now be "working hard" to deliver on the "priorities that Canadians have". He was quoted as saying, "When we get back to Ottawa, every single day we are in parliament, New Democrats are going to be working to make sure Canadians' lives are better."
He is not the first expatriate Indian to make a mark in politics abroad. If it hadn’t been for the diaspora, Cheddi Jagan would never have ruffled British feathers by being elected chief minister of colonial Guiana as long ago as 1953. Nor would an indigenous Fijian have mounted a coup in 2000 if another ethnic Indian, Mahendra Chaudhry, not been democratically elected prime minister of Fiji. But for one two-year gap, the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius has always had an Indian-origin prime minister, beginning with the veteran Sir Seewoosaugur Ramgoolam who first took office in 1961. The exception was the Franco-Mauritian Paul Berenger, prime minister from 2003 to 2005. All the other incumbents have not only been Hindus but belonged to two local Indian settler families.
According to many Irishmen, Ireland’s ethnic Indian prime minister, Leo Varadkar, sounds absolutely Irish except for an occasional lapse. The lapse isn’t surprising for Dr Varadkar, whose father was Maharashtrian, completed his medical training at Mumbai’s KEM Hospital and has visited India several times. He also happens to be gay but is casual about his sexuality. "It's not something that defines me,” he says. “I'm not a half-Indian politician, or a doctor politician or a gay politician for that matter. It's just part of who I am, it doesn't define me, it is part of my character I suppose". Perhaps a more important feature of the diaspora is that the richest Irishman — Pallonji Shapoorji Mistry, a builder worth more than $20 billion — is Indian. Mr Mistry owns a 200-acre stud farm in Ireland. His son-in-law Noel Tata is Ratan Tata’s half-brother.
It would be unfair to suggest that India is not aware of this potential source of soft power or has not tried to tap a diaspora that is measured at anything from 17 million to 40 million. The traditional view was that people who had left the country had forfeited all claims on India. Jawaharlal Nehru even advised Indians in East Africa and elsewhere to identify with their countries of adoption. That attitude changed because of a combination of factors – atrocities against Indians by regimes such as Idi Amin’s in Uganda, mounting pressure from influential lobbies, particularly in developed countries, for dual citizenship, and the lure of hard currency remittances. The result was the immigration status of Overseas Citizenship of India, which succeeded the earlier People of Indian Origin which, in turn, replaced the run-of-the-mill NRI or Non-Resident Indian. OCI status permits a foreign citizen of Indian origin to live and work indefinitely in India.
Simultaneously, the Pravasi Bhartiya Divas, established in 2000 and held under the aegis of the external affairs ministry and various other official and semi-official bodies, tried to camouflage the pragmatic aspect of wooing expatriates with appeals to culture and emotion. For instance, the chosen day marked the return from South Africa to India in 1915 of the most famous expatriate of all, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the Mahatma. Mauritius’s prime minister, Pravind Jugnauth, was the chief guest at this year’s 15th Pravasi Bhartiya Divas session which was celebrated in Varanasi.
India’s efforts are not always successful. One complaint is that well-heeled political supporters of the ruling party in New Delhi receive the most attention. Others are neglected. It has been pointed out that Canada has 18 Sikh MPs against only 13 in the Lok Sabha. Not only does Canada contain the world's largest diaspora, but nearly 50 per cent of them are of Punjabi origin. Indians grabbed the lion's share — 43 per cent — of the 92,231 new permanent entry residents Canada admitted through its express entry system in 2018. The year before more than 26,300 Indians became Canadian citizens. Narendra Modi sent a terse message of congratulations to the 47-year-old Mr Trudeau, whose cabinet will be sworn in on October 20, on becoming king. Although Mr Trudeau has ruled out a coalition, Mr Modi might yet have to congratulate the 40-year-old Mr Singh on being the new king-maker.
The writer is the author of several books and a regular media columnist.
