Policy differentiation and the politics of belonging in India's diaspora and emigration policies

India is the largest migrant origin country globally (United Nations 2018). The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries have been a key destination since the 1970s and host an estimated 8.5 million out of 13 million Non-Resident Indians (NRIs), of whom the majority are low-wage workers (Khadria 2006). Particularly in the GCC countries, they experience major human and working rights abuses, such as unpaid wages, working excessive hours, and under dangerous conditions (Rajan and Joseph 2016). On paper, India established a social protection framework for its international low-wage migrants, e.g., an insurance scheme and support hotlines. Scholarship pointed out how welfare policies have become central for articulating citizenship (Ketola and Nordensvard 2018). However, despite Indian low-wage labor migrants being citizens of a formal institutional democracy, they cannot acquire substantive citizenship in practice, such as social, economic, and political rights. Meanwhile, the Indian state made intensive political efforts to extent symbolical and substantive rights to NRIs and naturalized, former Indian citizens residing in North America, European countries, and Australasia (Gottschlich 2012; Lall 2003; Xavier 2011), who work predominantly in high-skilled professions (OECD n.d.) via so-called diaspora policies. Indian emigration and diaspora policies thus have been privileging some groups while excluding others. Against the backdrop of Indian diaspora and emigration policies, this paper analyses how states reconfigure belonging through differentiated policies and citizenship laws and their underlying mechanisms. Bridging the concepts of boundary work and constructivist understandings of diaspora to deconstruct policies, this article scrutinizes how mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion form changing definitions of membership. It shows how classed notions of (non-)belonging are central to emigration and diaspora policies. I argue that the policies’ exclusionary dynamics reflect disadvantaging and discriminating broader social structures and representational disjunctures between low-wage migrants and the Indian state, which are rooted in historical socio-economic marginalizations, limitations of the formal political system, and the constitutive role of informality in shaping and structuring citizen-state interactions in India. I develop the argument by contrasting India’s policy responses directed at migrants living in GCC and Global North countries, examining three examples. First, the Indian Emigration Act (1983), which established an emigration system based on education levels, and implicitly, class, and subsequently informed all Indian diaspora policies. It created low- and high-skilled migration categories and introduced emigration control measures for low-wage migrants. The dichotomous treatment traces back to colonial emigration laws (Raj 2015). Second, I scrutinize India’s institutionalization of its relationship with international migrants through symbolic and substantive policies, such as the Indian Overseas Citizenship, along the class and religious boundaries they establish; and third, Indian upper/middle-class-led migrant NGOs mediation of access to Indian embassies in destination countries on behalf of low-wage migrants. This article analyses data from three sources: legal and policy documents by the Indian government, semi-structured interviews with Indian migrant volunteer organizations in the GCC countries, and newspaper articles about the latter. This article demonstrates that origins states’ emigration and diaspora policies are not uniform but differentiated towards what is understood and constructed to be different groups of citizens.