Indians in the United States and the United Kingdom comprise around 20% of all Indian diasporans, making them one of the most populous diaspora groups in either country. As the world becomes more progressive and minority representation in politics increases, there has been a significant uptick in prominent Indian-American policymakers. But as a fellow Indian diasporan from both the U.S. and the U.K., I am frustrated by their right-wing tendencies and anti-immigration hypocrisies that populate my newsfeed time and time again. 

Take Nikki Haley: former South Carolina governor and an Indian-American immigrant success story. Her Sikh parents immigrated to South Carolina from India years ago to pursue higher education in the United States, starting a successful clothing boutique. Haley, raised a Sikh, converted to Christianity after marrying her veteran husband, and is now the mother of two children. Her life is, quite literally, the American dream. Her multifaceted identity, ‘girlboss’ politics, and conservative policy viewpoints make her the ideal immigrant-turned-politician of the Republican Party’s dreams. 

As someone who grew up seeing the positive shift from Apu from “The Simpsons” to Devi from “Never Have I Ever,” witnessing people like Haley flaunt her daughter-of-immigrants identity to garner popularity while simultaneously condemning what she calls ‘identity politics’ feels like ten steps backward from the progress South Asians have made in Western society.

Haley, throughout her political career, has emphasized her status as the first minority and female governor of South Carolina, making headlines and advancing her political career. As a proud Republican, she upholds typical conservative views of pro-lifeism, “American strength,” and anything else you might find in an average Fox News article. 

But beyond her unoriginal political stances, what she is most notable for is her sheer sense of hypocrisy (which, for the Republican party, is somewhat unoriginal, too). Haley recently rose to prominence in U.S. politics with the announcement of her 2024 presidential campaign. Despite her repeated emphasis on her minority identity, calling that ‘identity politics’ is a step too far, at least for her. In her presidential campaign video, she highlights that she is the “proud daughter of Indian immigrants,” while then going on to dismiss “identity politics,” despite the fact that she uses her own identity to get votes. It doesn’t matter that she repeatedly shared stories of her father, who wears a turban, racially profiled; according to Haley, “America is not a racist country.” 

As Aimee Allison, the founder of a Democrat-aligned minority-empowerment campaign, so aptly put it, “You cannot have it both ways.” 

What Haley demonstrates is the phenomenon of ‘shutting the door behind you.’ 

In diaspora contexts, this refers to how many immigrants take on anti-immigration and other conservative political views after immigrating to their host country. This may stem from the common encouragement to leave behind their ‘old’ way of life and fully assimilate into their ‘new’ culture. 

I was born in the United Kingdom, raised in Hong Kong and I now attend university in the United States; so, like many other Indians outside India, my relationship with my cultural identity is multifaceted. This also means I pay extra attention to the presence of diversity in global politics, which makes seeing a global trend of ‘shutting the door behind you’ confusing and frustrating. 

Beyond that, it is angering that politicians selectively flaunt their Indian-American and Indian-British identities to appeal to the masses and get votes, yet embody right-wing ideals that are not actually representative of the communities they claim to speak for. 

According to a study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, most Indian-Americans tend to be more Democratic than Republican. Not only do they ideologically place themselves more left, they even consider the Republican Party to be “unwelcoming.” This is the reality of Indian-Americans that Haley so often gets wrong. Most Indian-Americans don’t stand for her values. 

This troubling phenomenon is prevalent in minority and diaspora politicians globally, beyond just Haley in the United States. Suella Braverman, a member of the Indian diaspora and the United Kingdom’s current Home Secretary, is the perfect example of this. 

Braverman embodies a similar sense of hypocrisy. In her speeches, Braverman often talks about her parents’ journey as Indian Kenyans to the United Kingdom in the 1960s. Her parents “loved Britain from afar, as children of the Commonwealth,” (the same Commonwealth, mind you, that put 1.5 million Kenyans in detention centers during that same time period for opposing colonial rule.) 

But what led them to success? Well, they embraced a new British identity, speaking English and ultimately doing what every ‘good’ immigrant should do: assimilate. 

Now, in 2023, Braverman has pushed for inhumane policies that would most likely bar her parents from entering the United Kingdom had they immigrated today. 

On March 7, she introduced one of the most draconian asylum bills the United Kingdom has ever seen. Following the polarizing Rwanda asylum bill of last year, this even more controversial bill will essentially block most routes to legal and safe migration to the United Kingdom. As per this new policy, the U.K. government will be allowed to detain adults who arrive in the country on small boats for up to a month without any avenue of judicial review or bail. They will be unable to apply for asylum or petition for their detention, and will not even be allowed to use modern slavery laws. In theory, they will either be sent back to their countries or to a third, ‘safe country’ such as Rwanda, which are the only places where they will be allowed to apply for asylum. 

However, these appeals will amount to nothing considering that under this bill, migrants who arrive on small boats will subsequently be banned for life from entering the United Kingdom. This draconian, inhumane bill is already a breach of international refugee law, according to the United Nations. 

Beyond this, the language Braverman uses in discussing her signature new policy reflects a harmful ‘us vs. them’ mindset that right-wing South Asian politicians so often embody. 

“Let’s be clear, they are coming here,” said Braverman when discussing her bill in Parliament. 

“They will not stop coming here until the world knows that if you enter Britain illegally, you will be detained and swiftly removed.” As the daughter of immigrants to the United Kingdom, does she not realize that at a certain point, her parents were the ‘them’? 

Why do we see such high levels of hypocrisy in Indian diaspora politicians? 

Maybe this derives from the strangeness of assimilation. What even is assimilation? The idea that immigrants need to be seamlessly integrated into the life of the country they move to is antiquated — shouldn’t we be past that by now? With first, second and even third-generation immigrants, the idea of being ‘American enough’ or ‘British enough’ is so common it’s almost become a trope. 

I can’t say I haven’t fallen victim to this. As someone who has grown up in international and multicultural environments outside of India, self-questioning has been a mainstay my whole life. It’s the first line in the third-culture-kid, diaspora playbook. Having this muddy perception of your idea of ‘home’ and personal cultural identity can go multiple ways. Either you hyper-assimilate, you fully embrace your ethnic identity, or you find a peaceful place somewhere in the middle. 

What Haley and Braverman are pushing forth with their politics, and what they both embody, is the ‘right kind of immigrant.’ This is someone that works hard and champions the local, homogenous nature of the country they live in, even if that means stripping away their own culture. 

Now, I’m not one to judge Haley’s or Braverman’s ultra-personal, multifaceted relationships with identity and culture. But when they are in decisive positions of power, and selectively leverage their ‘original’ Indian identities to get votes while pushing forward policies that disadvantage the very people they claim to represent, it’s a cultural cop-out. 

In both of their cases, the right-wing end of the political spectrum is often equated with patriotism and being truly ‘of’ that country. In the United States, it’s Republicanism, and in the United Kingdom, it’s Toryism. As part of these conservative parties’ ideals, the right-wing is often the one that takes such hardline stances against immigrants and refugees. How ironic that the daughters of those very immigrants are now the ones touting the same xenophobic rhetoric. 

Maybe it’s a form of political Stockholm syndrome, or some form of reversed, convoluted, “don’t feed the hand that bites you” situation; but either way, it reeks of an identity crisis. 

If Haley and Braverman claim to truly represent the minority Indian communities they are a part of, then they should embody the values that those communities champion. Indian culture is considered collectivist, or promoting the wellness of the society and whole group over that of the sole individual. Where are those values in Haley and Braverman’s foreign policy? 

Identity is, by nature, intertwined with politics. After all, it is the business of understanding people’s needs, just in a more serious capacity. I have grown up excited to see my identity represented in politics more and more, especially as a young person eager to break into the global political scene. 

While it’s great to see many more politicians that look like me, it frustrates me that they seem to reject the values of the very communities they openly boast about being part of. They praise the melting-pot-ness of our countries until it is time to actually gather the ingredients. If this is the representation we’re getting, then maybe I don’t want it.

On July 5, the United Kingdom published a joint multinational statement on freedom of religion and gender equality resulting from the 2022 International Ministerial Conference on Freedom of Religion or Belief, an international human rights conference. Twenty-two countries were originally co-signatories to this statement, but that quickly changed after a quiet deletion of a significant passage on sexual and reproductive rights by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO). 

This passage described a commitment to abolish laws that “allow harmful practices, or restrict women’s and girls’ … sexual and reproductive health and rights, bodily autonomy.” As a result, only eight co-signatories, including the United Kingdom, are left on the website. Countries like Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands are refusing to sign the edited version of the statement unless their concerns about the deleted passage are appropriately addressed. The FCDO responded by saying the removal was to make clear a “perceived ambiguity” in the wording. 

While the logic of removing details of a reproductive rights commitment to make a statement less ambiguous may seem backward, this is hardly new for the United Kingdom. Contradictory statements and legislation are a hallmark of the conservative-led country, most remarkably regarding reproductive and abortion rights.

Abortion is legal in the United Kingdom under the 1967 Abortion Act, but only under certain circumstances. If a person does not have their abortion approved by two doctors, performed by a doctor in a healthcare setting, and is not beyond 24 weeks of pregnancy, they will be subject to the punishments of the 1861 Offenses Against the Person Act (OAPA), an archaic law that carries up to a life sentence in prison.

So while abortion is technically legal in the United Kingdom, this legality exists merely as an exception to a Victorian-era criminalization of the procedure. 

People today are still getting charged and tried under the OAPA, including a 25-year-old woman accused of “unlawfully administer[ing]to herself a poison or other noxious thing, namely Misoprostol,” a routinely prescribed abortion pill. Numerous other women are being accused of illegal abortions, accusations which are mainly based on nothing but stillbirths and pregnancy losses.

But why is there so much contradiction regarding laws on reproductive rights? According to parliamentarians, abortion is an issue of conscience, referring to issues like the death penalty, euthanasia and homosexuality, which means that MPs vote on issues “according to their moral, ethical or religious beliefs.” 

It is absurd that majorly consequential issues are left to individual parliamentarians’ wildest personal beliefs, while every other inessential political issue is dealt with party democracy. Reproductive rights are not an issue of morals or politics; they are a matter of fundamental healthcare. Designating these rights as conscience issues is problematic, especially as the majority of British lawmakers will never be affected by this so-called conscience issue.

The crackdown on abortions does not stop there. The Human Rights Act (HRA), passed in 1998, is a historic and successful piece of legislation. It has enshrined fundamental economic, social, and political rights in U.K. law, rights which have allowed for the investigation of the police’s mishandling of violence against women cases like Sarah Everard’s, and the government’s mishandling of the pandemic in its adherence to the Covid restrictions. 

The U.K. government is scrapping the HRA and instead introducing the Bill of Rights Bill. Forging rules and laws in their favor, such as passing racist and discriminatory immigration policies to deport incoming refugees to Rwanda without intervention by the European Court of Human Rights, is just another attempt at securing British control by power-hungry politicians. 

In the new bill of rights, the government has refused to include abortion rights, claiming the issue was already “settled in U.K. law.” This is yet another unconvincing excuse, especially considering the terms of existing abortion legislation are intrinsically flawed, given the OAPA’s looming authority. It evidently doesn’t matter to them which marginalized groups’ rights are trampled in the process, whether it is asylum-seekers or people with uteruses, and it remains unclear to what extent the U.K. government will go in backtracking on fundamental human rights. 

Beyond quiet removals of references to abortion, parliamentarians like Nadine Dorries are actively trying to attack abortion rights. Dorries has been advocating for lowering the limit for abortion from 24 weeks to 20 since 2008, despite legitimate medical reasons not to. This advocacy turns a medical issue into an arbitrary designation, and it is a slippery slope from here if her campaign gains traction.  

As these events closely follow the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the United Kingdom is starting to seem like a 51st U.S. state, following in the country’s tracks of government crackdowns on reproductive rights and an increase of anti-choice protests, all worsened by an overworked and underfunded NHS. As a result, the health and lives of women, transgender people, nonbinary people, poor people, and people of color will be affected the most. 

Policies surrounding abortion and reproductive rights in the United Kingdom are not as progressive as many previously have thought. With a new prime minister soon to be voted in by the Conservative party, the attack on reproductive rights is not going away anytime soon. 

Both Tory candidates Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have historically abstained on most, and in the case of Sunak, all, major abortion votes, proving their prior commitments to protecting women’s rights to be all smoke and no fire. Abstention is silence, and it speaks volumes. 

Regardless of which candidate gets voted in as Britain’s next prime minister, the dangerous backpedaling of reproductive rights will only worsen without serious and actionable intervention to promote decriminalization of abortion and reproductive justice. The United Kingdom prides itself on its safe and accessible healthcare, so it is time to finally act on it. 

On Feb. 24, Russia launched a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine under the guise of a “special military operation,” which has already resulted in over a thousand civilian casualties and more than 1.5 million refugees fleeing the country just within the first ten days. With this war creating the “fastest-growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II,” the world has reacted to these atrocities accordingly. Public outcry — whether in the form of digital solidarity under the #StandWithUkraine hashtag or international governments’ public condemnation of Russia — has been both impactful and rightful in its intention, but it is also important to criticize this outcry. Because amid global media’s coverage of the crisis, racist undertones of several journalists and outlets have started to emerge. 

In an interview with the BBC, David Sakvarelidze, Ukraine’s deputy chief prosecutor, expressed his discontent with the situation. 

“It’s really emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed, children being killed every day with Putin’s missiles,” he said. 

Likewise, in an article in The Telegraph, journalist Daniel Hannan wrote about why this war is unique and surprising.

 “They seem so like us,” he wrote. “That is what makes it so shocking.” 

Furthermore, NBC correspondent Kelly Cobiella reported on how and why Ukrainian refugees are unlike those from other conflicts around the world. 

“Just to put it bluntly, these are not refugees from Syria, these are refugees from neighboring Ukraine,” Cobiella wrote. “These are Christians, they are white, they’re very similar to the people that live in Poland.”

Similar sentiment — expressing the so-called uniqueness of Ukraine — has been found across major Western media outlets. CBS News Foreign Correspondent Charlie D’Agata went so far as to describe the dissimilarities of the Ukraine war and other wars, calling Kyiv a “civilized city.” 

“This isn’t a place […] like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades, this is a relatively civilized, relatively European city,” he wrote. 

In this language, it’s easy to see a harmful pattern emerge. D’Agata’s comments are especially hypocritical considering that in the countries he degrades as having “conflict raging for decades,” much of this destabilization has escalated to the level it is at now because of complex histories and legacies of Western imperialism and invasion — much of which is at the hands of European countries.

The choice of language used in all of these recent examples is telling as to what kind of content the media chooses to air and publish, and what sentiments are being promoted. Racial microaggressions that allude to white supremacist thinking are rampant, even in the few examples outlined here. 

The use of words such as “civilized,” “like us,” “blue eyes and blonde hair,” in attempts to evoke empathy from viewers and readers, beg the question of who the targeted audience or consumers of this media are. What people comprise “us?” If it is indeed white Europeans, a message is sent to the ‘others’ — the people of color, the “uncivilized,” the ones in areas with “conflict raging for decades” — that their struggles and experiences in conflict are expected, and are unworthy of genuine empathy and global sympathy. 

Individually, these comments are heinous, and somewhat hypocritical considering the reporters who made these comments may not even possess the very features they laud as worthy of caring about. However, the conglomerate of these instances is indicative of a larger issue of Eurocentrism and white supremacy in mainstream media, especially considering the channels and networks that dominate are largely American or European. 

The racial microaggressions used by the media are an explicit way of expressing Eurocentrism and white supremacy in the news, but the lack of or selectivity of what stories actually get covered is also an implicit way of expressing these sentiments. 

But this issue is not new; the world has seen countless instances of mainstream media repeatedly prioritizing the coverage of white, European individuals and publics experiencing conflict or injustice over that of people of color. 

This challenge is often seen beyond the coverage of conflict. Take the concept of “missing white woman syndrome,” for example. Women like Gabby Petito, Sarah Everard and Madeleine McCann experienced a level and duration of news coverage that enormously surpassed the level of coverage of any of the missing Black women, who make up over one-third of all missing women just in the United States alone, or other women of color. 

The West unfairly gets to dictate what is newsworthy and what is not. Sure, some may claim the discrepancy in media coverage, language used and emotions conveyed is due to a difference in relatability of the stories, but the true root of this problem is racial bias, which should not carry over into what is promised to be unbiased and independent news reporting. 

Moving forward, mainstream media platforms need to publicly shed light on and condemn the racism present in the language of their reporters and on their platforms as a whole. As a global community, the bar must be raised. 

The problem is not that the world is doing too much in support of Ukraine, it is that the world is not doing nearly enough for the dozens of other active conflicts currently happening globally. Erasing media bias entirely is difficult, and perhaps impossible. But it’s a pursuit  necessary in ensuring that coverage of world events is not disproportionately increased just because it fits the comfort and agenda of the West.