Parmod Chhabra is deeply involved in the Indian general elections that begin on Friday, with nearly a billion people eligible to vote, but he will not vote.
Neither will the vast majority of the overseas Indian community in Canada.
The reasons are simple. India requires foreign citizens to travel back to their home electorates to vote in person on election day. There is no option to vote by mail or email for the general population abroad, and people like Chhabra lose their eligibility because they also have foreign citizenship.
“I will suggest that there are a very small number of people who will vote again,” said Chhabra, president of the Indian Association Canada community group in Ottawa, citing the roughly 14-hour flight from Toronto or Vancouver and back. trip fees are around $2,000.
“If it was close enough, like a three- or four-hour flight, I bet there would be hundreds of thousands of people,” he said. “The level of interest is very high, but the cost and time it takes to get there is prohibitive at this time.”
Indian authorities say about 969 million people have registered to vote in the 44-day general election, creating a massive electorate of about 12 percent of the world’s population for the largest election in history.
“It’s simply the biggest type of voting exercise humanity has ever seen,” said Vina Nadjibulla, vice-president of research at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. “It’s a kind of election the world hasn’t really seen before.”
However, for a country with a huge overseas diaspora population, the vote of Indian citizens abroad is scarce due to the rule of in-person voting.
Official figures showed that of the more than 600 million votes cast in the last Indian general election in 2019, only 25,606 came from foreign voters.
Nearly 100,000 of the 1.35 million eligible overseas Indian citizens had registered to vote, said University of Victoria political science professor emeritus Reeta C. Tremblay.
By comparison, the Philippines (another democratic country with a large overseas diaspora) recorded more than 432,000 overseas votes in its 2016 presidential election, with about 1.4 million registered as eligible. Filipinos registered abroad can vote by mail or at consulates and embassies around the world.
“The traditional argument against overseas voting has been that Indian citizens living outside India, who generally have negligible knowledge of domestic affairs, could unduly influence the election outcome,” Tremblay said in a response. written to the questions.
“India has begun to reconsider the inclusion of foreign voters through different means: proxy voting, electronic voting, postal voting or voting at diplomatic missions,” Tremblay said. “However, nothing appears to have materialized for the 2024 election.”
India Canada Organization president Naseer Mehdi Khan said there are about 25,000 temporary foreign workers from India working in the tech sector, and many were eager to vote.
“We were asked to convey the same (concern) to the (Indian) High Commission,” Khan said of the desire of many Indian citizens to vote without traveling to India. “We suggested that they should vote in the Indian elections… People really want to participate, but they couldn’t.”
The election comes amid attention on the relationship between Canada and India, which has recently hit new lows.
Last year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said there was credible intelligence that Indian authorities were involved in the murder of Sikh community leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia, something India denied.
An investigation this month into foreign interference in Canadian elections has heard allegations of Indian involvement. The Indian government has called the claims baseless.
Researcher Tremblay said foreign interest in India’s elections has perhaps never been greater, around the world, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration coinciding with India’s rising international profile and strengthening its influence. economical.
Tremblay said the justification that foreign voters needed more knowledge of India’s internal problems “seems to have lost ground” in light of the diaspora community’s global attention and involvement in Indian society in other ways.
“Overseas Indians bring in huge remittances,” he said, referring to money sent home by people abroad. “In 2023, India topped the global charts in remittances with $125 billion. Additionally, overseas Indians are also a source of funding for political parties. With Mr. Modi’s popularity among the Indian diaspora, this has acquired a much greater importance”.
Chhabra and Kahn echoed those sentiments.
“These are the most important elections in years for India’s development,” Khan said. “Everyone is talking about it. What will happen after these elections? Are they going to continue with the promises they have made? I spoke to one of my nephews (in India) and they are really looking forward to it, as if it were the first time they are going to vote.”
Chhabra owns property in India, numerous family members live there, and he plans to split his time between the two countries now that he is retired. But because of his Canadian citizenship, he cannot vote even if he wanted and could travel.
However, he said he has been increasingly interested in Indian politics since Modi became prime minister in 2014.
“I think what we are primarily looking for is stability,” he said. “That’s the only thing we’re seeing in this election, because we’ve seen in the last 10 years that stability, where prices are not going up as much. Politically, things are stable, their investments are safe. And so, people are looking the continuity of that.”
—Chuck Chiang in Vancouver
This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 18, 2024.