Unknown Indian

We urgently need to find out what makes our deported migrants so desperate to leave the country

As planeloads of our deported migrants land in the country a number of questions are being asked. Why are they handcuffed? Why are all the planes landing in Amritsar?

But the most important question has yet to be raised, let alone answered. Why did they risk and lose their life savings, and in some cases even their lives, in such do-or-die attempts to get out of our country, the world’s fastest-growing major economy and the world’s most populous democracy boasting a global soft power outreach from yoga and Ayurveda to Bollywood and bhangra rap?

Incredible India is indeed incredible. And one of the more incredible things about it is that so many of its citizens will go to such dire lengths to get out of it, legally or otherwise. The wealthy do so by acquiring qualifications that will enable them to become foreign citizens. The poor, or the not-so-wealthy, try to do so through the dangerous route of illegal migration.

Unemployment is one of the biggest problems facing the country, so the lack of jobs and ways of earning a livelihood would seem to be the most compelling reason.

However, most of the deportees are from states like Punjab, Haryana, and Gujarat, billed as being among the most prosperous in the country. Many of the deportees reportedly paid agents sizeable sums, enough to start a small business or provide other means of self-employment.

This is the mystery of the illegal Indian migrant, the unknown Indian. The Indian who escapes India physically like a prisoner breaking out of jail, and yet carries along the mother country in heart and mind, in language, cultural custom, and caste and community identity.

We should discover from the returning migrants what made it so imperative for them to forsake their country and do so at such jeopardy. It’s through getting to know the mind of the unknown Indian that perhaps we’ll get to know what we don’t know about our country, or what we choose not to know about it, in an ignorance of complacent bliss.