There is a question that sits quietly at the back of many Indian minds but rarely gets asked out loud in polite company. It is the kind of question that makes dinner tables uncomfortable and television anchors nervous. And yet it demands to be asked, cleanly and without theatre: do the people who run India, speak for India, and profit most from India actually have India as their first allegiance?
The children of the powerful offer one uncomfortable answer.
The Offshore Lives of India’s Ruling Class
The pattern is too consistent to be coincidence. Across India’s political, bureaucratic, business and cultural élite, a striking number of the next generation have quietly migrated westward. The United States absorbs the largest share. Green cards are held, citizenships are acquired, and careers are built in Washington, New York, San Francisco and Houston. The United Kingdom follows. So does Australia. Dubai serves as a useful midpoint.
There is also a cold arithmetic that accelerates this migration. One US dollar is currently worth almost Rs. 90. One British pound fetches nearly Rs. 118. One Euro stands at close to Rs. 100 and one Canadian dollar converts to roughly Rs. 63. For a young professional earning in any of these currencies, a single year’s salary in the West is the equivalent of a decade’s savings in an Indian metro. This is not sentiment. This is mathematics. And the nationalism of many Indians who leave, including those from élite families, is strictly monetary. It bends precisely at the point where the exchange rate makes a different passport more rational.
This writer has seen unmistakable glee and ecstasy on some Indian faces, who managed to get foreign work visas, foreign permanent residency and foreign citizenship. There was relief written all over their faces because they were going to exit India.
This orientation toward the West did not begin with the current generation. Rajiv Gandhi, who became Prime Minister in 1984, was himself educated at Imperial College London, and his government deliberately recruited economists trained at the World Bank and the IMF as policy advisors, while his technocrat ally Sam Pitroda, educated at the Illinois Institute of Technology, drove India’s telecommunications revolution. The intellectual pipeline between western institutions and Indian policymaking was not a recent development. It was a founding design.
The Indian élites have come to the conclusion that their lives will be much better in overseas lands than in India. That is why, at the very least, they have homes in overseas lands, even if they don’t acquire foreign citizenship or permanent residency. India, as you all may be knowing, doesn’t permit dual citizenship, like some other nations of the world do.
The Bureaucratic Footprint Abroad
External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar is among India’s most articulate defenders of strategic autonomy. His son Dhruva Jaishankar spent the better part of a decade at the Brookings Institution’s India Project and subsequently at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. His formative professional years were shaped entirely by the American foreign policy establishment. Dhruva’s wife, Meredith Lilly, is a Canadian academic at Carleton University in Ottawa. Three western capitals are woven into the personal geography of the family of the man who argues most forcefully that India must resist western intellectual dominance. This is not said to condemn. The structural irony, however, is substantial.
Vikram Misri, India’s Foreign Secretary, has a daughter, Didon Misri, who lives in London and works at international law firm Herbert Smith Freehills. She was viciously trolled in May 2025 after Operation Sindoor, attacked for legally assisting Rohingya refugees. Her father was called a traitor. Former Foreign Secretary Nirupama Menon Rao publicly defended him. Misri restricted his X account. The episode cuts both ways. The élite transnational pattern is real. So is the mob nationalism that cannot examine itself.
Ashwini Bhide, the IAS officer who built Mumbai’s Metro, publicly celebrated on X when her son Malhar’s AI startup Origin Bio launched a biology model reportedly outperforming Google DeepMind’s AlphaGenome. Malhar built his company in America with Y Combinator backing. Prime Minister Modi subsequently invited him to a CEO roundtable at the PMO. The circularity is worth sitting with. India produced an officer capable of building transit infrastructure for millions. That same system was not considered sufficient for her son. America trained him, funded him, and India had to court him back. That is a structural confession, not a personal story.
Piyush Goyal, the BJP heavyweight and Mumbai North parliamentarian who regularly champions Atmanirbhar Bharat, has a son, Dhruv Goyal, who has worked in investment and finance in the United States. The irony of a minister urging Indian youth toward self-reliance while his own son builds a career in an American financial hub is not a small one.
The Ro Khanna Arc
The American political landscape now includes a Congressman from California named Ro Khanna, who represents one of the most powerful technology constituencies in the world. He was born in Philadelphia. His family had emigrated from India before his birth. His grandfather, Amarnath Vidyalankar, was a prominent Congress politician and parliamentarian who resisted Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in 1975 and paid a personal price for that courage.
His grandson now legislates in Washington. A man who fought for Indian democracy produced a family that found its fullest expression of ambition in America. One can read this generously, as the natural dispersal of talent in an open world. One can also read it with some unease.
The Leader Who Was Also Shaped by America
In July 1993, a young BJP karyakarta from Gujarat named Narendra Modi was invited by the American Council of Young Political Leaders, a US State Department-funded programme, for a two-week visit to the United States. He met Senators, Governors, toured the Pentagon and visited NASA. The man who today champions India’s civilisational sovereignty and strategic autonomy was himself shaped, at a formative political moment, by a programme funded by the American government. That complexity deserves acknowledgement. It does not diminish him. It humanises the larger argument: the relationship between India’s ruling class and the western world is far more intimate, far more formative and far more mutual than the rhetoric of either side usually admits.
The Congress Side of the Same Ledger
It would be convenient to frame this as a problem unique to the current dispensation. It is not. Rahul Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition and the Congress party’s most prominent face, completed his M.Phil in Development Studies at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1995, having earlier studied at Rollins College in Florida. He then worked at the Monitor Group consulting firm in London for three years before returning to India. The man whose party campaigns most loudly against élite detachment from ordinary Indians built his own formative years across Florida, Cambridge and London. The Nehru-Gandhi family’s educational geography, from the Doon School in Dehradun to Harvard to Cambridge to London, is itself a map of élite western orientation stretching across generations. Both wings of India’s political establishment have drunk from the same well. The masses are invited to choose sides between them.
The Infrastructure of Influence
The institutions these élites pass through are not neutral and their funding tells its own story. Brookings, where Dhruva Jaishankar spent formative years, counts the government of Qatar as its single biggest foreign donor, reportedly contributing nearly fifteen million dollars over four years, according to the New York Times. It has also received funding from the governments of Norway, Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, and from Pentagon contractors, including Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Airbus. Between 2012 and 2018, it accepted funding from Huawei, the Chinese technology giant with documented ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
CSIS, where Dhruva also worked, is funded by defence contractors Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics and Raytheon, and by corporations, including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, Walmart and Cisco. Its foreign government donors include Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Norway, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and Canada.
Monitor Group, where Rahul Gandhi worked in London, was acquired by Deloitte in 2013 after filing for bankruptcy. Deloitte, one of the Big Four accounting firms, now audits or advises nearly ninety percent of the Fortune 500, with major clients including Boeing, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley and General Motors, and it holds government contracts with the United States Navy and NASA. Its global revenue in 2024 was sixty-seven billion dollars.
Y Combinator, which backed Malhar Bhide’s startup, sits at the centre of Silicon Valley’s technology establishment, having previously funded Airbnb, Stripe, Reddit and OpenAI. The World Bank and IMF, whose trained economists shaped India’s 1991 liberalisation, were created under American leadership at Bretton Woods in 1944 and have historically functioned as instruments of western economic influence over developing nations. None of this is secret. All of it is structural.
Nationalism as Theatre
The same Indian politicians who send their children to American universities and British colleges appear on primetime television to denounce western interference in Indian affairs. The same industrialists who hold London property fund nationalist campaigns about India First. This is not merely hypocrisy. It is a structural arrangement. Nationalism, for the Indian élite class, functions as a product designed for domestic consumption.
The Jindal family’s wedding celebrations provided a vivid recent illustration. Kangana Ranaut, the BJP MP from Mandi and Bollywood’s most publicly nationalist voice, was among those learning choreography for the event. In an August 2024 episode of the Raj Shamani podcast, Ranaut made a candid admission that has since circulated widely. She said, in substance, that parliamentarians from opposing parties who fight bitterly and viciously on the floor of the House will walk out together, share a meal and have a good laugh about all of it. The combat, she implied, is largely performative.
Smriti Irani, the BJP cabinet minister who ran one of Indian politics’ most aggressive campaigns against Rahul Gandhi in Amethi, and Supriya Sule of the NCP were among the female parliamentarians present at the same celebrations, visibly comfortable in each other’s company. Their respective parties trade insults in parliament. Their spokespeople spend evenings destroying each other on television. At a billionaire’s wedding, none of that appeared to apply.
This surprises no one who covers Indian politics from close range. The BJP versus Congress war that ordinary Indians feel viscerally in their personal relationships is, at the top, largely a contest for power between two wings of the same class. The real consensus operates elsewhere, quietly and efficiently.
The Pakistan Dimension
This class solidarity extends across borders. Indian and Pakistani business élites maintain functional contact through Gulf forums, Davos sidelines, and back channels well below the radar of official relations. Sajjan Jindal of JSW Group met then-Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in Islamabad in 2015, a publicly acknowledged visit framed as private diplomacy. Élite access moves freely across a border ordinary citizens cannot approach without ordeal and suspicion. This pattern predates both the current BJP government and the Congress governments before it, running as a quiet constant beneath every administration regardless of which party controlled the treasury benches in parliament.
An ordinary Indian and an ordinary Pakistani who express friendship publicly risk social censure. When industrialists from both countries share a table in Dubai, nobody throws bricks. The conflict is maintained at high emotional temperature for popular consumption while the élites navigate around it with quiet efficiency. The masses fund it emotionally. The élites manage around it practically. That is, broadly, how it has always worked.
Cricket, Culture and the Geography of Success
Indian cricket is a Rs. 100,000 crore industry built on the passion of ordinary fans who will never earn in a lifetime what its biggest names earn in a week. Several of the sport’s biggest names have built distinctly transnational lives.
Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma have been consistently and credibly reported to spend extended periods in west London and the upscale residential corridors of Hertfordshire, among the most expensive addresses in Britain. Sachin Tendulkar, the figure who more than any other came to embody Indian sporting aspiration across two decades, reportedly owns substantial property in the Wimbledon area of London, one of the most coveted residential postcodes in the country. Sourav Ganguly, the former Indian captain and ex-BCCI president, purchased a two-bedroom flat in North Harrow, London in 2008, a fact confirmed by sources close to his family and reported by the Times of India. The flat sits a 45-minute drive from Central London.
MS Dhoni’s connections to Dubai are well-documented in sports and business press. Yuvraj Singh’s property interests in the UAE have been reported across multiple credible outlets. The sport worth Rs. 100,000 crore runs on the passion of people who will never own a square foot in Wimbledon or a Dubai apartment. The beneficiaries of that passion make different choices about where they actually live.
Why they actually leave?
Beneath all the confident talk of a rising India, there are deeply troubling structural realities. Government school infrastructure remains uneven. Top public research institutions are underfunded relative to global peers. The job market for young graduates outside a narrow élite band is genuinely precarious. Air quality in major cities is a documented public health emergency. These are not complaints. They are documented facts that explain why even bright, patriotic young Indians look at the exchange rate and make a rational calculation.
When élite families make that same calculation, they do so with far more resources and far more to lose from acknowledging it publicly. So they do not acknowledge it. They speak instead about civilisational greatness, the demographic dividend, India’s global rise. Then they book their children’s flights to Rollins College, Trinity Cambridge, the Illinois Institute of Technology, Harvard, the London School of Economics, or any of the dozens of western institutions that have quietly hosted India’s next generation of rulers for decades.
Can They Protect What They Do Not Fully Inhabit?
A bureaucrat whose child works for an American consultancy will carry a different calculus into a meeting on data sovereignty. A politician whose son holds a green card is compromised in ways that are subtle but real. You do not need a foreign handler to have a divided loyalty. Geography and economics do the same job more quietly, over years, with no fingerprints and no paper trail.
The Mass Delusion
Ordinary Indians fight about political parties on social media with a ferocity that costs them friendships, family relationships and mental peace. They believe the contest is real. They donate time, money and emotional energy to campaigns run by people who will share a table at a private celebration the following weekend and have a perfectly pleasant evening, regardless of party affiliation. The awareness of this gap is growing fastest among younger Indians, the ones who cannot afford the flights their leaders’ children board so routinely.
India is a serious country with serious civilisational stakes. It deserves a ruling class that lives those stakes rather than performing them. What it has, more often than not, is a class that sells nationalism to the masses while quietly making entirely different arrangements for its own children.
That gap, between the performance and the reality, is where the real story has always lived.
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