Three days after the visit of the Prime Minister of India to the United States, two military planes carrying more than 200 people, including families with babies, landed in the Indian state of Punjab. The adult passengers were shackled hand and foot. They were Indian illegal migrants who had just been deported. "Those who are illegally in other countries have no right to stay there," Indian leader Narendra Modi stated after a meeting with Donald Trump where he had portrayed India as one of Washington's great allies. Meanwhile, in his country, a political storm was brewing over the humiliating conditions in which compatriots were returning.
"Is it necessary for them to travel in handcuffs? The deportation process is degrading and goes against human dignity. They are mistreating our citizens. This is not characteristic of a great democracy like the US," protested Gaurav Gogoi, a lawmaker from the main opposition party in India. On Friday, more than a month after the return of the first Indians with shackles, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs shared a statement expressing that they had "strongly conveyed their concerns to US authorities" regarding the treatment of the deportees.
After images of another group of Indian migrants handcuffed on a 40-hour plane journey went viral on social media in February, several legislators and protesters have gathered on various occasions in front of the Parliament in New Delhi, even burning an effigy of Trump. "This inhumane treatment is more characteristic of dictatorships like China or illiberal democracies like ours. So we know what the US is becoming with Trump at the helm," remarked popular commentator Prithviraj Sathe.
The term "illiberal democracy" was coined in the 1990s by the Indo-American writer Fareed Zakaria, who currently works as a presenter and analyst at CNN. Zakaria titled an essay he published in Foreign Affairs as The Rise of Illiberal Democracy, where he argued that the threads holding together the traditions of democracy and liberalism were rapidly eroding. Zakaria referred to systems where free elections are regularly held, but their liberal principles - such as the separation of powers, respect for a free press, and fundamental rights - are progressively crumbling; countries that retain many democratic mechanisms and freedom of expression, but where their rulers exhibit many authoritarian traits, with much greater government control, especially over the state apparatus and the media.
This is what many critics denounce is happening now in Modi's India. And also, according to them, in Trump's US. This week, an Indian researcher from Georgetown University, Badar Khan Suri, was arrested and, after his visa was revoked, faces deportation. According to US authorities, this is because Suri "spread Hamas propaganda and promoted anti-Semitism" on social media. His posts on X summarize by pointing out that his country, India, is "complicit in Israeli genocide" because Modi has supplied missiles to the Israeli army.
"From January 2025 to date, a total of 388 Indian citizens have been deported from the United States," reported Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar last week.
Indian authorities have also communicated that, at the moment, there are 295 other Indian migrants in US custody awaiting deportation. A report from the think tank Pew Research Center, based in Washington, estimates that there are around 725,000 undocumented Indians living in the US, mostly in California, making them one of the largest migrant groups after those from Mexico and El Salvador. Although the latest official data from the Department of Homeland Security, from 2022, significantly lowered that figure by 220,000.
US authorities recently notified that they had identified around 18,000 Indian citizens who entered the country illegally. Over the past decade, according to data compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), asylum applications from Indians in the US have surged from around 5,000 to over 50,000.
One of the Indians who unsuccessfully sought asylum was Harjit Singh. In October, he took a plane from Delhi to Amsterdam. From there, he traveled to Johannesburg and then to Guyana with a tourist visa. By land, he crossed through Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala. His final stop was Mexico, arriving at the US border in late January. As soon as he set foot on US soil, he was arrested by border agents and taken to a detention center. He spent 18 days there before being handcuffed and deported to India.
Harjit's round trip is one of the many stories emerging these days about deported Indian migrants. "We are collaborating with US authorities to ensure that deportees are treated with dignity," Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar assured this week. A statement not shared by opposition parliamentarians, led by the Congress Party, who accuse Modi's government of bowing to Trump to avoid India being hit by the trade war unleashed by the US president.
The vast majority of deported migrants are Hindus from the state of Gujarat, Modi's political stronghold. The Prime Minister often touts the "economic success" of Gujarat, where his party, the nationalist Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), governs, as a management model for the rest of the country. Therefore, the Indian government is forcing planes carrying deportees to land in Punjab, a state controlled by the Congress Party.
But no matter how many maneuvers Modi makes, he cannot hide a reality that is very present in vast India: in a very young country where millions live below the poverty line, many workers seek opportunities in prosperous countries like the United States.