Description
This paper examines how Indian international students operate as non-state actors in the transnational diffusion of authoritarian politics. While scholarship on democratic erosion in South Asia has predominantly focused on state-led mechanisms, this study highlights the role of migrants--differentiated from diaspora--in reproducing illiberal repertoires abroad. Drawing on empirical research with Indian international students at a UK university, the paper analyses how Hindu nationalist ideologies are transmitted through political remittances, reshaping host-country civic spaces.
The findings reveal how students enact transnational authoritarian practices such as silencing of dissent and policing of peers through digital surveillance, and normalise vigilante intimidation. These practices replicate homeland authoritarian patterns of Hindutva, thereby extending India’s democratic decline beyond territorial borders. In doing so, students emerge as crucial non-state actors who not only carry but actively embed authoritarian ideologies into host-country institutions, with direct implications for diversity, inclusion and social cohesion.
The paper also considers the broader political implications of Indian international student mobility. As Commonwealth citizens, these students hold voting rights in the UK, and their political remittances can directly influence host-country electoral politics. In addition, their integration into the labour market and their participation in diaspora networks, which can sometimes be linked to organisations such as the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) that has ties to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), extend Hindutva’s reach transnationally, aligning with global far-right arguments in support of nativism and Islamophobia.
By discussing students as agents of transnational authoritarianism, this paper expands the geographic and theoretical scope of the argument that non-state actors can shape democratic decline in South Asia.
