The Ugly Indian Migrant and the Ripple Effect

Across the world, and for decades, the Indian diaspora was regarded as a model minority-productive, eager to assimilate, law abiding and generally civil.

- Ajai Sahni

This image is rapidly being tarnished, with a rising tide of hate directed against the community. The escalating racism, xenophobia and anti-migrant sentiment in the US and the wider West are certainly among the sources of this growing antipathy, but cannot exhaust the entire burden of culpability.

Over recent years, increasingly 'bad behaviour' among elements of the Indian diaspora has provoked a backlash, as aggressive demonstrations of religious and national identities as well as engagement in criminality, violence and a cynical exploitation of the freedoms and welfare schemes offered in some host countries, undermine historically positive images. There is, moreover, a progressive failureoften a refusal-to integrate with the host cultures, with elements of the Indian diaspora clustering in ethnic ghettos and striving to recreate the very cultures or some imagined imitation of these-they sought to escape by migrating.