The Diaspora and Indian Elections

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India holds the largest elections on earth. The general election to the seventeenth and eighteenth Lok Sabha each involved an electorate of roughly 900 million to 970 million registered voters, polling conducted in multiple phases across weeks, and more than a million polling stations. Somewhere beyond the edge of that machinery sit the estimated eighteen million people of Indian birth living outside India, the largest population of international migrants originating from any single country according to United Nations estimates, plus a far larger number of people of Indian descent who hold other citizenships. Their relationship to Indian elections is intense, well funded, emotionally charged, and, in the matter of actually casting a ballot, almost entirely theoretical.

Who can vote, and how little it helps

India does not permit dual citizenship. A person who takes Australian, American, British or Canadian nationality ceases to be an Indian citizen, and with citizenship goes the vote. What such people can obtain is Overseas Citizen of India status, a lifelong visa and residence entitlement introduced in the 2000s that confers many practical rights but expressly excludes voting, contesting elections, holding constitutional office and buying agricultural land. The great majority of the settled diaspora in the English speaking world therefore has no franchise at all in India, and cannot acquire one without renouncing their adopted citizenship.

A smaller group does retain the vote: Indian citizens living abroad on work visas or student visas, which describes much of the population in the Gulf states, where several million Indian nationals work in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain, along with many recent migrants elsewhere. The Representation of the People (Amendment) Act of 2010 created a category of overseas elector, allowing such citizens to register in the constituency where their Indian passport address is located. The catch is decisive: an overseas elector must appear in person at that polling station on polling day. There is no postal ballot and no voting at embassies. The result is that registration numbers have remained in the low hundreds of thousands, a rounding error against a national electorate approaching a billion, and actual turnout by overseas electors is far lower still, dominated by people who happened to be visiting India anyway.

The Election Commission of India has recommended extending the electronically transmitted postal ballot system, already used for service personnel and their spouses, to overseas electors. Legislation to do so has been drafted and debated but not enacted, and the objections are practical rather than partisan: verifying identity across dozens of jurisdictions, guaranteeing ballot secrecy, and managing the sheer administrative load. The question remains open, and diaspora associations across the Gulf, North America and Australia continue to press for it.

Influence without a ballot

The absence of a vote has not produced political absence. It has produced a different kind of participation. Indian parties, most visibly the Bharatiya Janata Party through its overseas friends organisations and the Indian National Congress through its own overseas wing, maintain volunteer networks in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Singapore and the Gulf. During Indian election campaigns these networks organise phone banking to relatives in India, produce and translate campaign material, run social media amplification in several languages, and in some cases send members to India to campaign in person in their home districts.

Money is more tightly controlled than manpower. Indian law prohibits foreign contributions to political parties, and the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act regulates overseas funding to non governmental organisations and associations. Amendments passed in the 2010s adjusted the definition of a foreign source in ways that critics argued opened space for donations from Indian owned companies registered abroad, a change contested in court and in Parliament. What remains legal and unlimited is the diaspora's expenditure on its own events: hall hire, advertising and travel for large rallies in host countries.

Those rallies are the most visible expression of diaspora politics. Indian prime ministers have addressed enormous overseas gatherings, including at Madison Square Garden in New York, at Wembley Stadium in London, at Sydney's Olympic Park precinct and at a stadium event in Houston, Texas. These are not campaign events under Indian law, since they occur outside the country and usually outside election periods, but they perform a campaign function: they generate images of global admiration that circulate widely inside India, and they signal to host country politicians that the Indian origin community is organised and worth courting.

Why the diaspora cares so much

Several forces sustain this engagement. Remittances are the most concrete: India has for years been the world's largest recipient of remittances, with annual inflows recorded by the World Bank in the range of tens of billions of United States dollars and rising past the hundred billion mark in recent years. Families that send money maintain a stake in Indian economic policy, property law, currency movements and taxation.

Identity is the second force. Migrants often engage more intensely with the politics of the homeland than those who stayed, partly because distance simplifies the picture, partly because minority status abroad heightens attachment, and partly because the internet has removed the lag that once separated diaspora opinion from Indian opinion. WhatsApp groups linking a family across three countries now carry Indian political argument in real time, with all the misinformation problems that implies in every direction.

The third force is host country politics. In Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States, Indian origin communities have grown large enough to matter electorally in specific seats, and Indian domestic disputes, over Kashmir, over citizenship law, over caste discrimination ordinances in American cities, over Khalistan advocacy in Canada, have been fought out on foreign soil with real diplomatic consequences. The diaspora's political weight, in other words, is being exercised. It simply is not being exercised through the ballot box in India, and there is no near term prospect that it will be.

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