Asylum-seekers "denigrate the nation and society" to seek shelter in other countries, minister of state for external affairs Kirti Vardhan Singh told the Rajya Sabha on Thursday in response to a question on the manifold increase in the number of such cases from India.

"The Government of India believes that asylum seekers, while applying for asylum to a foreign government, denigrate the nation and society to obtain personal gains despite the fact that India, being a democratic country, provides avenues for everyone to redress their grievances lawfully," Singh said in a written reply to a question from the Congress's Kapil Sibal.

Sibal had asked for the total number of Indians who have sought asylum in foreign countries during each of the last three years and the current year, country-wise; whether it is a fact that there has been an 800 per cent rise between 2021 and 2023 in the number of Indians seeking asylum in the US with half of them being from Gujarat; and the steps being taken by the government to address the issue of Indians seeking asylum in foreign countries.

The minister did not provide any data on asylum-seekers, maintaining that "accurate data regarding the number of asylum applications and the actual number of people granted asylum or the grounds on which asylum is sought or granted is not available as the foreign governments concerned cite inability to share such data due to privacy and data protection laws".

Europe had seen a surge in applications from Indians for asylum in 2021 and 2022, most of which were rejected. Indians figured in the top 30 citizenships of first-time asylum-seekers to the European Union in 2021 and 2022, ranking 10th. "The most substantial increases in relative terms were recorded for citizens of India (+605.6%)…," Eurostats (the statistical office of the EU) had noted last year.

India has since moved down to 27th position and the last updated figures as of March-end this year show a drop in the number of asylum-seekers from the country in Europe. "The most substantial relative decrease was recorded for citizens of India (-67.3 per cent)," Eurostats noted.

Recent media reports suggest that the number of Indians seeking asylum in the US has gone up over the past couple of years with 41,000-plus applicants last year alone. In an article earlier this month, the Migration Population Institute, a Washington-based bipartisan think tank, said: "US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encounters of Indian migrants arriving irregularly at a border or airport peaked in FY 2023, at nearly 97,000, but decreased slightly to approximately 90,000 the following year. While most migrant encounters overall take place at the US-Mexico border, almost 44,000 encounters of Indian nationals were at the US-Canada border in FY 2024." Not all are necessarily asylum-seekers.

"Many of these migrants come from parts of northern India where young people — particularly educated ones — face high rates of unemployment and other challenges. Political tensions around a Sikh separatist movement in the state of Punjab and other factors may also be contributing to emigration. Migrants traveling without authorisation often pay tens of thousands of dollars to travel facilitators who send them through long chains of countries with accommodating visa requirements — a process known as 'donkey flights' — before finally reaching a US border."

One such flight ferrying Indians from Dubai to Nicaragua had been grounded in France last December. They were hoping to enter the US illegally and the silence around their return to India spoke volumes of how it reflected on the government.