In January 2016, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) published its annual report on migration trends. There were several striking results from the survey that had been conducted, including the fact that the number of international migrants had increased by over 40 per cent just in the new millennium, reaching an all-time high of 224 million. However, the fact that was highlighted in Indian media outlets was a different one – according to the DESA report, India had become the country with the largest diaspora population in the world. Serendipitously, or so it seemed, the report's findings were released around the time of the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas celebrations organized by the Indian government. The annual event, inaugurated in 2003, has been touted by successive administrations as the Indian state's acknowledgement of not just the ‘contributions of Overseas Indians to India's development’, but also the critical importance of this constituency to India's position on the global stage. In that sense, insofar as the Indian state was concerned, the results of the UN survey only served to underscore the correctness of its stance towards its overseas population. This stance – premised on highlighting the Indian state's appreciation of the role of the diaspora as well the necessity to further develop that role – has been a relatively novel one in the history of postcolonial India.

While the existence of a migrant population is not a recent development in Indian history, it was not until almost the end of the twentieth century that this group became a focus of the Indian state's policymaking apparatus, marking a distinct shift from the immediate post-independence era. The goal of this chapter is to explain the logic and nature of this shift, and to interrogate its potential implications. To do so, the chapter is divided into three parts. The first section provides a short history of the waves of colonial and postcolonial migration from India, laying out the fundamental problems underlying the usage of the umbrella category of the ‘Indian diaspora’. The second lays out the history of the Indian state's relationship with this group, drawing out the stark contrast between the immediate post-independence foreign policy agenda and the one that emerged towards the last decade of the twentieth century.