United States Vice President J D Vance and Union Minister of Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal were economical with the truth in their recent remarks on Indian H1-B visa holders in the United States. Vance is aware of the fact that US corporations, supporters of the Republican Party, have benefited from access to lower-cost Indian talent. Goyal knows well that governments in India, including his own, have long sought more US visas for people seeking access to American education and employment.One must, however, appreciate the transparent honesty of Vance when he refers to H1-B visa-holding Indians as “foreign indentured servants”. Despicable though that condescending view of professionals is, it sums up a view of the imperialist West with respect to Indian immigrants. Indentured is a word Vance would have picked up from his highly educated Indian-American wife, Usha Chilukuri. Servant is not a pejorative term but upper-class and upper-caste Indians view it as such. Serve other countries is what Indian emigrants do and H1-B holders are in the US on a contractual basis. Not surprisingly, Vance’s put-down forced a government normally circumspect in dealing with the US to issue a rebuff.AdvertisementIndia has been home to two centuries of organised labour export. British India shipped out hundreds of thousands of “indentured labour”, as part of official government policy, to overseas territories where local labour was in short supply. The governments of free India have also encouraged the export of labour to countries where local labour is either in short supply or is simply unwilling to do the work that imported Indian labour is willing to, wanting to, waiting to. (With apologies to Bernard Shaw.)Goyal, however, was being less than honest when he waxed eloquent on how any curtailment of H1-B visas would be welcomed by India since this would help retain talent at home. That is a welcome change in thinking and a departure from official policy that has consistently sought more opportunities for Indians to work overseas.As I have recorded in my recent book, Secession of the Successful: The Flight Out of New India (Penguin Random House), there isn’t much difference between British colonial policy on indentured labour and Indian government policy on low- and high-skilled labour emigration. In both cases, the government of the day provides legal cover for the export of labour. Rapacious businesspersons have, in both cases, short-changed desperate people seeking a better life.AdvertisementMake no mistake. Nineteenth-century indentured labour were as desperate to get out of their homes in search of a better life as the 21st-century Indian middle classes have been. Governments of the day offered a legal framework for such business to go on. Of course, life on plantations was not comfortable. Nor was life in containers and concrete holes across most of the Arab world. Life in the West has been more comfortable and the earnings better but the bottom line is the same. Low-cost Indian employees may not think of themselves as “indentured servants”, nor did the “girmitiyas”, as the indentured labour on the Indian Ocean islands were referred to.Not only have successive Indian governments sought more work visas from around the world, they have sought a multilateral framework for what the terminology of the World Trade Organisation refers to as “Mode 4” — the cross-border movement of labour for the purpose of overseas employment. Economists have justified this on two grounds, one theoretical and the other practical. In theory, they have sought a correspondence between free mobility of capital and labour. In practice, they have justified it on the grounds that the home country receives dollar remittances boosting foreign exchange reserves.More recently, the export of labour has been promoted through public-private partnerships seeking “global access to talented Indians”. The Narendra Modi government has entered into memorandums of understanding with several countries ranging from Israel to Taiwan to export Indian labour. Unable to ensure employment at home and in the name of seeking foreign exchange, India has become an exporter of talent.At a time when many, including government officials, economists and business lobbyists, mock the notion of “brain drain”, even as their educated offspring depart for distant lands, Goyal used that unfashionable term to refer to the emigration of skilled professionals. “I wonder what would have happened if all of them had been doing their businesses, their research, in India?”, he wondered. Indeed. a good question from a member of a government that has been busy celebrating the success of overseas Indians in distant lands.In an era in which the developed and ageing economies are facing a demographic deficit, it is only natural that countries with a large, young and unemployed population would seek overseas opportunities for their youth. The export of human capital is, then, a necessity, not a virtue. It is useful to remember that even labour-importing economies often view the phenomenon as an avoidable necessity. When the going is good, immigrant talent is celebrated. When immigrant labour becomes an electoral hot potato, you get the Vance kind of put-down.Migration is a natural phenomenon, common to all living species. Yet, nation-states have imposed curbs on humanmigration. These curbs will only increase. A labour-surplus economy would understandably look for opportunities to export labour but it must also contend with rising anti-immigrant sentiment globally, and the need to retain talent and capital at home.you may likeWith non-resident Indians (NRIs) becoming “never-returning Indians”, and the next generation of India’s power elite emigrating in larger numbers, the government has to come forward with a plan to both retain and attract talent. This requires a fundamental change in the mindset of the regime in New Delhi and the ruling power elites across the country.The authoritarian and majoritarian instincts of the Modi government, apart from the persistent bureaucratism across all walks of life, discourages overseas Indians from returning home. Global talent seeks both opportunity and freedom. The highly bureaucratised Indian educational and research system is not very welcoming of free-minded talent. PM Modi may often face an enthusiastic audience of overseas Indians but their nationalism ends with mouthing “Bharat Mata ki jai”. Few in those gatherings are queueing up to return home.The writer is chairman of the board of trustees, Forum for National Security Studies, and Centre for Aerospace & Strategic Studies