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Every few months, a head of state lands in India with a wide smile and a carefully rehearsed “Namaste.” Trade deals are signed. Strategic partnerships are announced. The world, it seems, cannot get enough of India — its billion-plus consumers, its software engineers, its geopolitical weight. Yet the moment an ordinary Indian walks into a foreign embassy, boards a plane to Europe, or rents an apartment abroad, the warmth often evaporates. So what exactly is going on?
The gap between how countries treat India-the-nation and Indians-the-people is not accidental. It is the product of layered prejudices, genuine cultural friction, and — it must be said honestly — some real behavioral problems that we as Indians need to confront ourselves.
The Prejudice Problem
Racial and cultural stereotypes about South Asians run deep in many Western societies. Indians are frequently caricatured as pushy, loud, or unhygienic — assumptions that have little to do with any individual and everything to do with ignorance baked into popular culture over generations. In countries like Canada, Australia, and the UK, Indian students and workers have reported discrimination in housing, at workplaces, and even on the street, even as their governments enthusiastically court India for investment and diplomatic support.
This is a classic double standard: a government can admire a country’s GDP while its citizens harbor prejudice against the people who built it. Separating the “useful” abstraction of India from actual flesh-and-blood Indians is politically convenient and morally lazy.
“The world wants India’s market and its engineers — but it is far less eager to treat Indian individuals as equals deserving of dignity.”
The Civic Sense Question — An Honest Look
Prejudice alone does not explain the full picture, and intellectual honesty demands we look inward too. Civic habits that many Indians consider normal — honking constantly, littering in public spaces, speaking at high volumes, ignoring queues, or treating service staff poorly — can genuinely clash with the social norms of other cultures. These are not genetic traits; they are learned behaviors shaped by an environment where public infrastructure has long been neglected and civic institutions are often unresponsive. When the footpath is broken and the garbage truck never comes, people adapt accordingly.
But those adaptations travel. When an Indian spits on a Singapore street or cuts a queue in a London post office, the individual’s action reinforces an existing stereotype, making life harder for every Indian who follows. The problem is not that Indians are inherently inconsiderate — it is that civic education in India has historically focused far more on nationalism than on shared public responsibility. We are taught to love India; we are less often taught to respect the shared space that India — and every country — actually is.
The Visa Wall
Perhaps the starkest expression of this double standard is the global visa regime. Citizens of wealthy nations travel to India with barely a form to fill. Indians, meanwhile, face some of the toughest scrutiny in the world: thick documentation requirements, high rejection rates, and the humiliation of being treated as a flight risk by default. This asymmetry is not just inconvenient — it is a signal. It says: we want your country’s business, but we do not fully trust you as a person.
Ironically, countries that impose the hardest visa conditions on Indians are often the same ones most aggressively lobbying New Delhi for trade access. The message received is uncomfortable but clear: individual Indians are liabilities to be managed, even as India-the-nation is an asset to be courted.
Two Sides of the Same Mirror
The solution cannot come from one side alone. Foreign governments need to interrogate whether their immigration policies and public attitudes reflect genuine security concerns or simply encoded bias against brown-skinned people from the Global South. That is a conversation those societies must have with themselves.
But Indians — and I say this as one — need to take civic responsibility more seriously. Not to earn the approval of foreigners, but because a clean street, a respected queue, and a courteous interaction are not Western values. They are human ones. A nation that wants a seat at the global high table cannot afford to send its citizens into the world unprepared for what it means to share public space with others.
India is rising. The world knows it. The real question is whether the world will ever learn to see Indians — not just India — as equal partners in that rise. And whether we will do our part to make that easier to believe.
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.