Mohan Guruswamy | Listening To The Stories Of The NRI Master Race!

I was sitting in a roomful of white people and NRIs bleached white by their Green Cards and PIO cards, and listening to their success stories. The NRIs, who despite their modest perches, have made quite an art of telling us what is wrong with our country. True, much is. But I don’t buy their story (which, incidentally, is also the RSS’ story) that Indians are a very special people.

I recently received an email from an NRI whose operating part was: “I would like to sum up our performance in the 20th century in one sentence. Indians have succeeded in countries ruled by whites, but failed in their own. They are flourishing in the United States and Britain. But those that stay in India are pulled down by an outrageous system that fails to reward merit or talent, fails to allow people and businesses to grow, and keeps real power with netas, politicians and assorted manipulators. Once Indians go to white-ruled countries, they soar and conquer summits once occupied only by whites.”

There is an essential truth in this. The relative success of Indians in the United States has more to do with the quality of the American system, which affords the opportunities to all to pursue their dreams and professional quests.

Typically, such self-laudatory messages usually list some of the Indians who have scaled high heights in the US. People like Indira Nooyi, Sunder Pichai, Satya Nadella, Shantanu Narayen, Sunita Williams and other such people, who are lauded and honoured ever so often during their fleeting visits to India. And do not mention Drs S. Chandrashekar, V. Ramakrishnan, Hargobind Khurana and Amartya Sen, all Nobel laureates who have brought India much more honour.

Other nationalities too do well in America too. George Soros is Hungarian. Steve Jobs was the son of Lebanese immigrants. Then of course there is Barack Obama, son of a Luo tribesman from Kenya, arguably the best US President in recent times. Boris Johnson is the grandson of a Turk and Leo Varadkar of Ireland is the son of a Bombay doctor married to an Irishwoman. People of Chinese origin have won the Nobel eight times. US scientists of Japanese origin have won as many as five science Nobel Prizes. Even Pakistan has a couple of Nobels. So it’s not just Indians who are a special people. What are special are the societies and systems that allow talent and genius to flourish.

This success of some Indians in foreign countries has given rise to a certain NRI mentality which makes them believe they have answers to all our myriad problems with their complexities, just because they have done “well” overseas. They forget that they are not as special as the societies that give them a better shake in life.

They think they are successful, because they have realised a Western lifestyle and a Western income. Our political and bureaucratic leaders too seem to have been considerably impressed by these “achievements” and the annual fests hosted by the Government of India to laud our NRIs is typical of this mentality. We don’t seem to realise that NRIs and PIOs cannot do much and actually do very little to benefit India. They have few investments here in India and our investment in them by what we have provided them and what we have let them take with them is still far greater.

Most of the MNC FDI in India is by resident Indians who round trip their illegally ferreted out wealth from overseas havens. The biggest investment that our better-off NRI brethren make in India is by investing in high interest-bearing NRI deposits in Indian banks. Most of them simply borrow from US banks at low rates and make a good pile each year on the interest rate differentials. The problem is that such funds now constitute a huge Damocles’ sword that by being able to take flight fast is a constant threat to our house of cards — Aadhaar, PAN, debit and PIO included.

Of the about $650 billion of foreign exchange reserves now, over $150 billion are reckoned to be the combined contribution from the Indian diaspora through deposits. Remittances are about $100 billion, half and mostly from our less privileged NRI brethren who toil in the most adverse conditions in the Middle East, Africa and other hard places to be able to support their families in India.

The NRIs who talk at our NRI fests and who we laud hardly remit any money back home. But they talk and talk, telling us what to do.

Indians can do well and do well in India. They send up rockets to the Moon and Mars, perform heart transplants, design satellites, splice genes, write code and so many of the things that are considered at the edge of the new frontiers of technology. And they can do this far more frugally than anyone else. The Mars orbiter cost us just Rs 450 crores, or about $73 million, and Isro succeeded in the very first attempt.

There is one thing which gives the NRIs a leg up. The educated NRI, as some of them are, are mostly better educated. The Western university system, particularly the American system, is the foundation of their collective superiority and achievement. The emphasis on self-learning, research and the seriousness makes foreign universities unique. I would even volunteer that an average state university in the United States imparts a better quality of education than our elite institutions like the IITs, IIMs, NLS and Nalsar, and the koi hai colleges of our big cities. The quality of faculty, libraries and research facilities are far superior. What makes our elite institutions elite is the quality of the student population. They are winnowed from millions by the world’s most ruthlessly competitive system.

There is a lot that is wrong with India. We can and should be doing much better. Nevertheless, India’s per capita GDP has grown six times over in the past two decades. It has grown annually at about seven per cent since 2000. Its GDP in PPP terms is the third largest in the world now and many Western financial institutions, such as Citibank and Standard Chartered Bank, have forecast that it will be the world’s largest by 2050. That’s just twenty-five years from now.

Mohan Guruswamy is a scholar and author. The views expressed here are his own.