More and more Indians are seeking asylum in the West, especially in the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Canada. But the ministry of external affairs, while informing Parliament of a spike in Indians seeking refuge in the US last week, had an intriguing explanation: asylum seekers, the minister of state for external affairs, Kirti Vardhan Singh, stated, “denigrate the nation and society” for personal gain. The Centre’s remark, on record in Parliament, is not only regressive but also an affront to basic human decency. If the external affairs ministry truly believes that the idea of Indians seeking asylum elsewhere hurts the country’s image, such a view is also counterproductive from a policy perspective. According to data, more than 41,000 Indians sought asylum in the US in 2023. That was an increase of more than 850% over the past three years, according to the US department of homeland security. Additionally, more than 90,000 Indians were arrested while trying to enter the US illegally from Canada or Mexico between October 2023 and September 2024. As of 2022, there were an estimated 725,000 undocumented Indians in the US. In the UK, more than 5,000 Indians applied for asylum in 2023 and over 1,000 entered the country illegally that year by crossing the English Channel on small, inflatable boats, risking their lives in the process. As of September 30, 2024, 24,380 asylum claims had been made by Indians in Canada.

These rising numbers of asylum seekers should be a cause for concern. Asylum seekers typically argue that they are victims of persecution, or could reasonably become victims of persecution, in India. Given the implication — that the Indian State persecutes many of its citizens — it is understandable for New Delhi to feel uneasy. But people do not uproot their lives and leave behind everything they know in order to denigrate a country. If an increasing number of Indians feel that they cannot trust the democratic processes and institutions within the country to offer redress to their grievances, that is an indictment of the direction in which the nation is headed. Indeed, this does not look good for the world’s largest democracy, one that has offered asylum to other victims of persecution for centuries. But the onus of fixing the problem lies with the government, not with people driven by desperation to seek refuge in another country. The Narendra Modi government must reflect on what it can do to reassure departing Indians that the country remains their best bet.