From the land of what-might-have-been

The combination of Narendra Modi's elevation to prime minister of India and the widely known fact of the Indian diaspora's financial support of the Hindu Right have resulted in the revival of a familiar question: what is wrong with all these non-resident Indians (NRIs) who seem to love the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)? While not exactly forgotten before the election, the Indian diaspora is subject to a kind of hyper-remembering, now that it is seen to have played a part in bringing about a Modi-led government at the Centre. Notably, the diaspora takes up far more space in conversations and media representations today than during the last BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government, in power from 1999 to 2004. The hyper-remembering is likely to continue as this BJP-led government makes it clear that the diaspora is to be an important cog in India's revamped economic engine. Modi's fête in New York's Madison Square Garden in September 2014 was the public relations inauguration of this declaration, another symbolic starting gun for the dubious economic race that 'Moditva' intends to win.

In trying to explain why US-based NRIs, in particular, love Mr Modi and the BJP, the age-old theories of immigrant nostalgia and a crisis of identity are enjoying a strong resurgence. As an article in Scroll.in claimed, "Modi's enviable popularity among non-resident Indians is perhaps linked to his emergence as an ostensible resolution to the identity crisis they experience in foreign countries. Most of these NRIs will never relocate to India even as they pine for it, both as an aspect of their memory and as the principal fount of their cultural identity." The author ends the piece by saying that NRIs' interactions with the Sangh Parivar are "driven by feelings of insecurity and inferiority". The argument is clear: Modi, in his own person, lights the way for insecure NRIs, modelling that you can have prosperity and Hindu-Indian identity at the same time.