How India’s diaspora influences nation’s politics

Last Friday, at London’s storied Wembley Stadium, globalisation met traditional politics from another continent. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, making a state visit to the United Kingdom, received a warm public reception and song-and-dance extravaganza.

The gathering of about 60,000 British Indians selected through community organisations had a serious purpose — build a database of overseas Indians to help re-elect Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) in 2019.

The party’s 2014 landslide win was supported by many non-resident Indians. Building on that success, the BJP’s central office has focused on bolstering its Overseas Friends of BJP (OFBJP) arm to induct the diaspora into reinforcing its machine with Internet skills and generous donations to the party and through meticulous planning and implementation all presented as spontaneous exuberance of overseas Indians for Mr Modi.

Repeating the 2014 success seems to be the overarching aim of elaborate planning behind meticulously orchestrated welcomes accorded to Mr Modi during his trips to the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Arab Emirates and Britain over the past 14 months. The activities do not violate Indian law.

The OFBJP will continue to orchestrate the key part of this scheme. The vast majority of OFBJP ranks are members of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, the foreign arm of the Hindu chauvinist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or National Volunteer Association.

According to Indian-American businessman Chandrakant Patel, head of the OFBJP (US), nearly 5,000 non-resident Indians flew home before the 2014 election to campaign for the party. About 3,500 left Britain for the same reason, most of whom are BJP backers with a minority supporting non-BJP groups.

In 2014, the BJP targeted 155 urban constituencies out of 543, labelled “digital seats” because of ease of access to voters unlike rural constituencies with minimal Internet connections, and the party secured assistance of OFBJP members.

Party headquarters supplied voter lists. In the US, the 4,000-strong OFBJP corps recruited volunteers who travelled to India to campaign. “The others made or sent at least 200 calls and SMSes every day from the US,” said Mr Patel. Such calls helped reduce abstention rates among middle or upper-middle class friends or relatives who might consider politics a dirty business and not bother to vote.

By staging enthusiastic rallies featuring Mr Modi in Madison Square Garden and Wembley Stadium, these numbers are set to rise in 2019.

GENESIS OF OVERSEAS RALLIES

The origin of this procedure can be traced to the BJP’s second successive defeat in the 2009 general election. The following year, BJP leaders installed an information technology cell at the party’s headquarters in Delhi.

Known as the National Digital Operations Cell, or N-Doc, the party established a database of nearly one million people who had over the years contacted the party across various platforms. With N-Doc focusing on the digital urban constituencies, a majority of the potential foot soldiers turned into election campaigners.

After a landslide victory in last year’s poll — despite winning only 31 per cent of the popular vote, thanks to vagaries of the first-past-the-post electoral system — BJP leaders decided to enlarge the OFBJP. This task was to be coordinated with foreign trips that Mr Modi intended to make.

An elaborate procedure was worked out for the public reception for Mr Modi at Madison Square Garden in New York on Sept 28, 2014 — drawing an audience of 19,000 Indian-Americans who cheered for him.

To gain an entry pass, applicants had to email their postal address, passport and driving licence details, and names of the Indian voluntary organisation to which they belonged. Event organisers obtained names of such associations independently and compared those with lists maintained by the Indian Embassy.

The Madison Square Garden procedure, using Indian community organisations that registered with the event organising committee, was finessed by Mr Vijay Chauthaiwale, who now heads the BJP foreign-policy cell in Delhi. He allotted quotas, based on the size of registered organisations, which had not been done before.

“I have travelled for the preparations of the diaspora events,” he told the Delhi-based Business Standard on Aug 25. “The first thing I tell everyone is not about the BJP or the OFBJP event, but about the entire community.”

Mr Modi handpicked Mr Chauthaiwale, a lifelong member of the RSS. With a doctorate in microbiology, he had served as a vice-president for a pharmaceutical company.

A study of the reception at London’s Wembley Stadium last Friday shows how shrewdly the BJP hides its political agenda with a non-political mask. Soon after taking up his job in November last year, Mr Chauthaiwale travelled to London for meetings with officials of the foreign arm of the RSS (UK).

Early this year, there was preliminary planning for Mr Modi’s London trip after the newly elected Conservative majority government led by Mr David Cameron was sworn in. In late June, four Indian businessmen set up the Europe India Forum (EIF) as a private limited company without shareholders.

Mr Nath Puri, one of the directors, acted as the official spokesman for what was routinely described as a not-for-profit company. Press releases were despatched describing EIF as the organiser of Mr Modi’s reception this year.

On Sept 15, its website, www. ukwelcomesmodi.org, published a list of more than 400 community organisations, all said to have signed up to welcome Mr Modi at Wembley Stadium. Each was given a quota and a code, to be shared with members for registering on the website.

The prime mover was Mr Chauthaiwale. In his interview with the Indian Express, published two days earlier, he explained that his effort was to set up a non-profit specific to the event and install an organising committee.

“Once this structure is in place, I back off,” he continued. “But I am still in touch … I help in coordination with the PMO (Prime Minister’s Office). The (Indian) Embassy is there, but we facilitate.”

Sure enough, at the UK Welcomes Modi Community Partner reception on Oct 4, Mr Chauthaiwale attended along with leading members of the organising committee — Mr Puri and Mr Shashikant Patel, the national treasurer of the OFBJP (UK) — along with the Indian High Commissioner Ranjan Mathai.

Once the organising committee accepted an applicant’s online registration, he or she was given a reference number that he or she had to bring along with their passport or driving licence for entry — for attendees, this seemed a routine security precaution.

Come India’s next election, those who attend receptions for Mr Modi may be urged to donate time or money.

Many who filled two-thirds of the 90,000-seat Wembley Stadium may not realise that their names and email addresses are part of a database at the BJP’s headquarters in Delhi. Come the next election, they will most likely be urged to act as campaign volunteers or make donations.

After a glitzy show of song and dance, Mr Cameron introduced Mr Modi to the audience. The latter hugged the British Prime Minister before delivering his speech in Hindi.

Given to praising the place where he speaks, Mr Modi pointed out that it was “the soil of London” that had given birth to India’s “freedom struggle” — in so far as such top leaders of the Indian independence movement as Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru had spent time there. Despite this tribute to London, with the exception of a few newspapers, Mr Modi’s gesture was ignored or mentioned only briefly by Britain’s press.

The news report that the Indian and British companies had inked agreed £9 billion (S$19.5 billion) in deals for the retail, logistics, energy, finance, IT, education and health sectors was also grist to the mill.

All in all, exploiting the digital revolution to the fullest, the BJP is set to create an international support network the like of which has not been seen before, much to the alarm of the opposition, the secular Congress Party. YALE GLOBAL

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dilip Hiro is the author of 36 books, the latest being The Age of Aspiration:Power, Wealth and Conflict in Globalizing India.