Congress MP from Amritsar Gurjeet Singh Aujla stood in these self-imposed shackles, demanding answers about why “our people” were treated like criminals, and excoriating the government for its betrayal. Others followed suit. The chorus of the Opposition also swelled in tandem: How dare they handcuff Indians? Where is our national dignity? Why didn’t the government arrange a more respectable mode of return than a military aircraft, like the government of Colombia?
Former I&B minister and Congress MP Manish Tewari challenged the government further by asking: “What is the point of all those summits with @realDonaldTrump if @PMOIndia & @DrSJaishankar can not ensure that our country men are not treated in the most humiliating and degrading manner.” For his part, an uncharacteristically subdued S Jaishankar, India’s External Affairs Minister, assured the Parliament that the US was only following the standard operating procedure, established since 2012.
In transforming the very real chains of deportees into props for protest, our representatives have—once again—pulled off a spectacular feat. They’ve managed to centre themselves in a crisis that was never about them. The jarring theatricality of this drama, and the seriousness with which the MPs essayed their roles, might make us laugh, but it really shouldn’t. This is a humanitarian crisis and should be treated as such.
An unsettling truth
The stories that emerged from the deportees are harrowing. Harwinder Singh, from Hoshiarpur, Punjab, witnessed a fellow traveller drown in the sea, and watched another succumb in the unforgiving Panama jungle. And for this extremely risky journey, he paid a price of Rs 42 lakh. Another deportee, promised legal entry by an agent who pocketed Rs 30 lakh, found himself stranded in Brazil for six months before being forced to attempt the border crossing that would end in his arrest.
For a moment, if we can set aside the illegality of these acts, we might be able to see the vulnerability behind these decisions: the vaporising of dreams, the choices we make when all the options seem like bad ones.
The social media discourse around these deportees offers a window into our complicated view of aspiration. Keyboard warriors, who until the Budget week were complaining about India’s prohibitive tax rates and poor quality of life, turned into wealth advisors overnight, dispensing financial advice in YouTube’s comments section. If only the deportees had the good sense of investing this money in mutual funds or other financial instruments, they said, admonishing those who emptied their savings accounts, mortgaged ancestral lands, and borrowed at extortionate interest rates to scrape together these astronomical sums.
But beneath this performative finger-wagging lies an unsettling truth: We recognise a little bit of ourselves in the desperate leap of faith that the deportees took. This hits home because every middle-class Indian family has a cousin who left for higher studies or an uncle who got married abroad. The methods might vary, but the underlying impulse to transform one’s circumstances remains unchanged.
Whose dreams matter?
To be unequivocally clear: These illegal migrants broke the law. But what’s legal, isn’t always just. This public sympathy, unprecedented for “illegal” migrants, stems from the knowledge that in a different reality, with a slightly altered pack of cards dealt by fate, their gamble might have been our own. This capacity for empathy is precisely what makes our response to migrants at our own shores so perplexing. Why does this tenderness evaporate when the conversation shifts to Bangladeshi immigrants or Rohingya refugees?
In 2018, Home Minister Amit Shah, then BJP President, labelled Bangladeshi migrants “termites”. “Should they be thrown out or not?” he demanded at a Delhi rally, “Millions of infiltrators have entered our country and are eating the country like termites. Should we not uproot them?”
This wasn’t a one-off remark—he repeated it multiple times at election rallies, prompting censure from international bodies. The path to mass atrocities, like the 1994 massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda, is often paved by powerful politicians comparing humans to vermin. This inflammatory rhetoric soon materialised into policy through the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, a state where these tensions have had a historical resonance. About four million residents, many of them Muslims, found themselves potentially stateless.
The Rohingya crisis offers perhaps the starkest illustration of our hypocrisy. Refugees from this minority community, often termed “the nowhere people”, are detained at holding centres for the crime of choosing survival over certain death. The International Court of Justice has recognised the “extremely vulnerable” status of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, but India’s response to those fleeing this horror has been to treat them as a security threat rather than survivors of ethnic cleansing. “As far as we are concerned, they are all illegal immigrants,” declared Kiren Rijiju, then Minister of State for Home Affairs, in 2017. “They have no basis to live here.”
Forget illegal migration from beyond our borders; our response to very legal internal migration is just as contemptible. Look at any major Indian city or town, and you’ll find it built on the backs of migrants from UP and Bihar—the construction workers of Mumbai’s skyscrapers, the domestic help in Delhi and Gurgaon’s gated colonies, the agricultural labourers in Punjab’s fields, and the plantation workers in Kerala’s estates. In many of these states, the local population has moved abroad, creating labour vacuums filled by internal migrants. Yet our relationship with these essential workers remains deeply cynical. The same middle-class sensibilities that empathise with deportees from the US will advocate for demolishing “illegal” colonies. We want their labour but not their presence, their service but not their slums.
Perhaps what the US deportations have inadvertently exposed isn’t just the limitations of our “vishwaguru” ambitions or the desperate gambles of our citizens, but the fundamental brittleness of our moral imagination. Our empathy extends only as far as our ability to see ourselves in the suffering of others—but no further. Until we recognise that dignity isn’t a privilege of citizenship but a fundamental human right, we’ll keep deciding whose dreams matter based on which side of the border they were born.