The Diaspora That Got Left Behind Have Exported Grievances

The Script of Victimhood

When Vir Das–a prominent Indian comedian who has both Grammy nominations and defamation police complaints from his homeland–said, ‘That is where the conservative India lives. Abroad.’, it was received as satire. Writing this from a university in the UK, I’m not sure that was his intention. The diaspora is meant to mark departure: a movement towards receptiveness, a rupture from the old. The current South Asian diaspora in the UK complicates that ideology by preserving ways of seeing the world that were meant to be left behind. 

Why do certain strands of conservatism not fade with distance, but instead become more entrenched, more defensive, and even more politically charged?

One way to begin answering this is to look at how such impulses surface within institutional life. In March 2021, Rashmi Samant resigned just weeks after being elected as President of the Oxford University Students’ Union, following backlash over past social media posts–seeming at first another episode of student politics and, at a stretch, of accountability. The controversy stemmed from a series of Instagram posts that were widely denunciated as insensitive, including remarks interpreted as racist and a flippant reference to the Holocaust. But the denouement was quickly recast as a story of persecution. Samant’s argument, supplemented by online Hindutva networks, mapped her resignation through a familiar ideological lens: criticism of her became criticism of Hinduism itself, Hindus subsumed as an embattled minority, and the probe flattened into prejudice. What began as individual conduct was reinterpreted as civilisational bias. It was a well-rehearsed strategy that has become fluent in British political life, a vocabulary of grievance that most institutions are still ill-equipped to identify. 

But who wrote the script for her?

The Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, the overseas arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)–a high-powered organisation with close association with India’s ruling party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)–has operated in Britain since 1966. They have offered shakhas–the weekly ideological gatherings–to East African Hindu families freshly expelled from their home, who needed spaces of belonging. It did not arrive as a political movement. It arrived as grief. Decades later, the rooms that were once suffused with the intimacy of belonging, resonated with the rigour of ideologies. While the switch was almost imperceptible for the diaspora to notice, what it produced was a community primed to receive a particular story about itself. When belonging has been built inside institutions that have quietly told you, for decades, that your identity was fragile and your culture besieged, any challenge to that identity will feel like confirmation rather than critique. Rashmi Samant did not need to persuade anyone. She only needed to activate something already felt, already trusted, because it came from the same spaces that had once offered shelter.

In fact, the vocabulary that Samant reached for had a name: Hinduphobia. But here is the point–it is the equal persuasion, turned inward. Turned inward, any criticism becomes Hinduphobia. Turned outward, the same conviction constructs Islam as an existential threat. Same foundation. Two faces. 

And in September 2022, Leicester made the outward face visible on British streets. Coordinated accounts based in India framed local Hindus as under attack from Pakistani and Islamist gangs, a narrative imported wholesale from BJP political rhetoric and detonated in an English city. What began as a series of local tensions, sparked in part by India-Pakistan cricket celebrations, quickly escalated into days of unrest between Hindu and Muslim groups, marked by marches, confrontations, and targeted violence. While an Independent Commission of Inquiry found that disinformation was the central accelerant and recommended that militant Hindutva be formally recognised within the UK’s extremism framework, the government did not act. And in that silence, the Western far-right understood something before the British institutions did. When an ideology goes unnamed by the state, it does not disappear, it becomes available. 

Tommy Robinson, a British far-right anti-Islam activist, did not need to build an alliance from scratch; he discovered an infrastructure embedded with the outrage already legitimised, and all he needed to do was to make himself useful to it. He pledged to mobilise hundreds of men on behalf of British Hindus, called Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rise a populist revolution, and was interviewed by OpIndia, an RSS-linked media outlet, reaching an audience of hundreds of thousands across the diaspora. All it required was the mere realisation that the Hindutva siege narrative and his politics were not in tension but in conversation, and all he had to do was walk through a door that was already open. 

This is what sixty years of quiet infrastructure building looks like when it finally becomes useful to people who had nothing to do with building it. 

The Hierarchy Within

The rigidities that Hindutva exports abroad is not only on those who stand outside of the community. It has always been about the ones who kneel within it too. Hindutva-inflected Hindu pride transmits through WhatsApp groups and temple committees, coiling around reclaiming dignity after centuries of colonial erasure. Yet, what is actually being safeguarded is hierarchy: the reassertion of an internal order that predates colonialism and outlives it. 

The Hinduism that Hindutva defends was never caste-neutral because the purity it supposedly seeks to preserve draws from the same argumentation that once normalised untouchability. The ‘us’ in us vs. them calculus is not singular, it is internally stratified. ‘Do not put them on the same pedestals as us.’ ‘Do not let them contaminate us.’ And so, the anxieties projected towards Muslim neighbours and Dalit proximity are not distinct impulses dressed as autonomous fears; they are expressions of the same instinct, refracted across different targets.  

The belief in Kala Pani, the idea that crossing the ocean meant an irreversible loss of caste status, rendered emigration as a form of social death for upper caste Hindus. And therefore, the first Indians who came to Britain were largely labourers belonging to lower castes–those with the least to lose from a system that had already circumscribed their futures. It wasn’t coincidence; it was theology. The ocean was not just a geographical boundary but a ritual one. To cross it was to become casteless, and the weight of that loss was not distributed evenly. Unlike the identities that were built on standing above others–for whom erasure was catastrophic–migration was closer to permission for those who had never been permitted to stand at all.

But later stories of the infamous ‘90s immigration had a different throb: the doctors recruited into the newly formed NHS, the engineers, and the IT workers were from upper caste, upper-middle-class backgrounds, carrying with them not just qualifications but social position. The inheritance of privilege became less visible since the country that promised them job-opportunities itself, did not recognise them as Brahmin. You were just a person of colour; you were just brown. And yet, when the structures that once conferred status fell away, the drive to recreate distinction did not disappear. It adapted and found new rooms. What unfolded in the west thereafter was just B. R. Ambedkar’s warning, ‘If Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would become a world problem’, playing out in real time. 

Having traded one form of erasure for another, Dalits (formerly known as ‘Untouchables’) in the West found that the hierarchy they had escaped had simply followed them onto the plane. In the UK where 200,000 people of Dalit origin exist, organisations such as the National Hindu Students Forum and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad UK have the stance that caste discrimination is best addressed by removing it from legal and public consciousness altogether. It does not remain a spiritual position anymore but an upper caste one. It tells the people experiencing discrimination what the terms of their liberation will be, then removes their standing to argue otherwise. 

British legislation, too, participated in the reproduction of caste hierarchies, sometimes unwittingly, yet no less consequentially. In June 2024, sixty-six Hindu nationalist organisations published the Hindu Manifesto, securing endorsements from over twenty parliamentary candidates. Buried within it were provisions that would make caste discrimination harder to prosecute. Most signatories likely did not read it carefully.

That is not a coincidence. That is the point. The Hindu Manifesto did not just advance Hindutva politics. It protected the hierarchy that Hindutva politics was built to serve, because the ideology and the social order were never separate projects. One tells you who the enemy is. The other tells you who, within the community, gets to decide.

The Geography of Conviction

The Indian diaspora does not shape politics abroad out of nowhere. It shapes it because it has to, because their realities demand it, because their futures depend on it, because the stakes are personal in ways that are difficult to argue with. In India, identity is architecture: built from religion, reinforced by caste, and only visible when removed. Cross an ocean and that architecture collapses. 

What remains is simpler and crueller–you are a person of colour in the West, and that is all you will be reduced to. History has proved, repeatedly, that suspicion travels faster than evidence when someone with a different skin tone is concerned–when a nation falters, it reaches for a scapegoat. Rarely someone with less melanin. And so, the dire need to hold onto every shred of recognition, even if it means never letting go of what you were before you became just another outsider, is understandable. But what cannot be easily excused is who the need to preserve protects–and who, on the other side of an ocean, is left to live with it. Because politics travels back and surprisingly, the ones who pay the price are never in Leicester or New York or Toronto. 

When the claims of Hindu persecution are measured against the documented conditions of India, without the insulation of distance, what materialises is not a community under siege–but one in power. It is a community that constitutes 80% of the population, whose Prime Minister won a third consecutive term, and whose most sacred political project was consecrated on the rubble of a demolished mosque. And a state that quietly removed from school textbooks the riots it oversaw–two thousand dead, overwhelmingly Muslims–while Modi governed Gujarat. The diaspora forwards messages about Hindu suffering. The state deletes the evidence of Hindu power. 

One could potentially argue that uplifting the majority community isn’t unprecedented and every country, to some degree, privileges its dominant culture. But here is the distinction: it is happening at the direct cost of minorities who are simply trying to coexist within the same borders. Therefore, the hate speech that targets religious minorities, which surged up by 74% in 2024, with six of the ten most frequent purveyors identified as BJP politicians–among them Prime Minister Modi himself–confirms the uncomfortable premise. When the majority rules, the violence it produces is not prosecuted, not documented, and not counted. It is made statistically invisible, which is to say, it is rendered acceptable.

So when NRIs celebrate the commemoration of the Ram Mandir, forward misinformation in Hindutva WhatsApp groups, turn up in thousands to ‘Howdy Modi’ event-style rallies across cities like New York to applaud his bravery of ‘saving’ Hindus back home, the cost is not borne by those cheering from afar. It is paid by those who will never have the liberty of distance. The ones who will will never outnumber the eighty percent majority in a population of one and a half billion.

This dynamic has a structural twin–a story that does not traffic in the same ideology but is built from the same blueprint, and has come to determine the fate of a community that constitutes just 1.75% of India’s total population. Here the dynamic becomes quietly devastating: the ones who migrated abroad demand something from their homeland that the ones who never left, largely, do not want. 

The Khalistani movement refers to the insistence for an independent Sikh homeland carved from the Punjab region of India. Its most deafening advocates are often descendants of families who fled India during 1984, the year the country orchestrated anti-sikh riots where thousands were massacred, following the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The grief that produced this movement is not arbitrary and the trauma that was instilled still breathes in documents and remembrance of those who endured. To dismiss it would be entirely dishonest. But the Sikhs who stayed–who lived through 1984, buried their dead, and rebuilt their lives–have largely moved forward. Even though the mark is indelible, living within a country demands a reckoning that distance does not. So the Sikh community present in the US, Canada, and UK–insulated from that fate–has remained in 1984, while Punjab has not. 

And frozen grief, it turns out, is extraordinarily useful to a government that knows how to weaponise it. When Punjabi farmers took to the streets in 2020 to protest against agricultural laws that compromised their livelihoods, Modi’s government reached immediately for the Khalistani label, painting a protest about wheat prices as a separatists conspiracy. In a nation where the Sikh population is already less than 2%, the designation of an entire community as a national security threat reveals something far more deliberate than political opportunism–it reveals a dogma that can only conceive of one religion as ‘safe’. And the visibility of difference as evidence of danger. And when the state decides you are a threat, visibility becomes liability. The turban does not hide. It cannot. It marks you in the same way melanin does, as something to be suspicious of, something that can be made to stand for a threat the state itself manufactured. 

The ones demanding Khalistan from abroad will never be deported for it but the ones in Punjab wearing turbans will pay the price.

When they left for a fairer system, for universities that would admit them, for economies that would reward their labour, for states that would not weaponise their identity, many NRIs did not look back. Harder to justify is the politics they sent back in their place. Someone else lives with the consequences–and it is never the one who raised the alarm.