Pictures of the first group of Indian immigrants deported by the Trump administration on a military aircraft, handcuffed and legs chained on the long flight home h❀as outraged public opinion. With Parliament in session, the opposition was up in arms, forcing foreign minister Subramanyam Jaishankar to make a statement in the Rajya Sabha on Thursday.
The optics are terrible for the Narendra Modi government that prides itself in taking the India-US relations to unprecedented heights. India has a "comprehensive global strategic partnership covering almost all areas of human endeavour….’’, is how the MEA describes its current relations with the US. And yet, the Donald Trump government has bundlꦐed out undocumente🌜d migrants of a "friendly country".
No one is batting for people entering the US illegally, and Washington has every right to throw them out. But this does not mean that Indian citizens have to be humiliated and chained to their seats on a nearly 20-hour flight from Texas to Amritsar. The fact that the US is doing it to illegal migrants from across the world is of little comfort. 💦
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor made the point succinctly: "We are protesting precisely this issue, that the manner in which the US did what they did was really unacceptable. We believe they have a legal right to deport people who are illegally in their country. And if they are proven to be Indian nationals, we have a legal obligation to admit them, to accept them in our country. But the manner in which it was done, in handcuffs, squeezed into a military aircraft, in su👍ch an abrupt manner is not acceptable.’’
As Jaishankar pointed out in his statement, this is not the first time Indians without valid documents have been sent back from the US. The process has been on from 2009. Th✃e minister gave the exact numbers: 2009, number of deportees 734, 2010-799, 2011-597, 2012-530,2013-515, 2014-591, 2015-708, 2016-1303, 2017-1024,2018-1180, 2019-2042, 2020 -1889, 2021-805, 2022𝓰-862, 2023-617, 2024-1368 and 2025-104.
Much is being made of the fact that the deportees were sent back on a military aircraft and shackled like criminals. But Jaishankar insisted that the procedure remained the same. ``This is applica൩ble to chartered civilian aircraft as well as military aircraft. There has been no change, I repeat, no change from past procedure for the flight undertaken by the US on 5 February 2025.’’
But this time around, the deportees were not sent home quietly. on a nationalist anti-immigrant plank. He had promised to throw out illegal "criminals, rapists, murderers and drug peddlers’’ immediately after taking office. So every plane load of migrants sent out was given maximum publicity. In fact the first video of the Indian deportees chained and handcuffed were released by the US Border Patrol on X with the words: "USBP and partners successfully returned illegal aliens to India, marking the farthest deportation flight yet using military transport. This mission underscores our commitment to enforcing immigration laws and ensuring💎 swift removals. If you cross illegally, you will be removed.”
Cracking down and taking action against illegal immigrants is all part of Donald Trump’s nativist domestic politics. But it has also hurt Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s nationalist image. Though it is a fact that the Indian nationals sent out have broken US law, making a spectacle of their humiliation does not suit Modi. India will have to engage with the US government and ensure that the deportees are treated with some amount of dignity. Jaishankar assured Rajya Sabha that India would do so.
The whole incident has left a bad taste. However the bottom line is that overall bilateral ties will not be affected. The Modi government cries itself hoarse over illegal migration from Bangladesh. Now that ♒the friendly government of Sheikh Hasina is no longer in power in Bangladesh, there will be many in the wider Hindutva fold who would like the government to take a leaf out of Donald Trump’s play book send illegal Bangladeshi migrants by the plane loads to Dhaka.
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in Washington next week for a meeting with Donald Trump, tricky issues like tariffs and migration will be on the table. How the two sides negotiate the bumps in the relationship is not clear. But so long as Trump regards China as America’s principle rival, India will remain relevant as a balancing factor in Asia. But if Trump and Xi Jinping cut a deal, that would be another story.
