The Netherlands: discovery of a new India

Vidya Subrahmaniam
The Hindu, 22 October

India is shining in the Netherlands which covets its market and workforce. But Dutch society is in ferment over immigration, which begs the question: How long before the Indian workforce faces the integration test?

At the office of the Confederation of Netherlands Industry and Employers located in The Hague, Chairman B.E.M. Wientjes, gushed about India. The CNI&E was the last of a rush of back-to-back appointments drawn up for the visiting Indian press group, and by now the lines were beginning to sound rehearsed: “We are proud of our 2.5 per cent economic growth. But you! You have achieved nine per cent. Really, really impressive.”

Over the next hour, Mr. Wientjes talked of corporate India’s cross-border ambitions, and its growing presence in the Netherlands. “Who would have thought this possible a decade ago” he asked rhetorically even as he admitted to fearing for his country’s future — greying fast, working too few hours, and technologically way behind India, a country he saw as young, highly skilled and hard working.

The “India Shining” theme was a constant throughout our week-long stay in Amsterdam and The Hague. From business captains to the woman on the street, the praise was effusive, often embarrassingly so. I had encountered India’s reborn avatar in January this year at the World Economic Forum summit in Davos. Indeed, in the chill of the Alpine heights I had stumbled upon a whole, new truth: India was being hyped not by an Indian government desperate for international recognition, it was being hyped by a world dazzled by its growth figures, the size and potential of its market, not to mention the daring evident in the overseas conquests of a few Indian companies. Davos hailed India as a powerhouse and hyphenated it with China, almost to the discomfiture of the visiting ministerial team protesting feebly about “the teeming millions at home.”

The Netherlands was a replay with the hosts toasting India and the visitors having often to interrupt the celebration. It was as if one stereotype had given way to another — both deeply etched and both overstated. The huge country groaning under mass poverty, hunger, red tape and a bloating population was now a huge country offering endless possibilities. The attitudinal transformation revealed itself as much in casual and formal conversations as in Dutch official reports, among them the Dutch Trade Board’s India action plan and the Social and Economic Council of Netherlands’ advisory report on labour migration policy.

The India action plan spoke of a “billion Indian consumers” — as opposed to the once billion wretched people — whose purchasing power offered “new opportunities thanks to the new climate of liberalization.” India, the plan said, was “in fact the most recent large-scale market to open up to the outside world.”

What about the red tape, asked the Indian journalists. Dutch officials confessed it was a problem but evidently not big enough to deter trade missions prospecting for opportunities in India.

One consequence of the “discovery of new India” is the extraordinary interest in the Netherlands around two high-priority visits to India. Queen Beatrix’s October 24 state visit is to be followed by the arrival in India of the “biggest-ever” trade delegation from the Netherlands. In itself, a constitutional monarch’s overseas visit would hardly qualify as important. Yet the queen, accompanied by the CEOs of eight Dutch companies, is to visit India after 21 years. The interregnum is when India, in the eyes of the Netherlands, changed from being a pre-liberalisation basket case to a post-liberalisation economic wunderkind coveted for its market and knowledge workforce. A Dutch official put it candidly: “We need a market and a workforce. You need investments and employment avenues. We both win.”

The perceived attractions of emerging India have in fact meant a relaxation in the till-now tight Dutch immigration policy. In March this year, the Social and Economic Council of Netherlands advised changing the labour migration policy — from a strict “no, unless” to a more lenient “yes, provided that.” Yet it is not a uniform lowering of barriers. The “yes” policy is reserved for knowledge and highly skilled workers, both of whom are in plentiful supply in India. Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen confirmed to the Indian press group that visa and permit procedures had been accelerated for these categories; indeed that Indians already accounted for 30 per cent of skilled migrants into Holland.

Obviously, the policy continues to tilt towards a “no” for the lower-end potential immigrants — hardly any from India but a sizeable number from the Middle East. Not just this. The red carpet rolled out to Indian tech workers contrasts sharply with the way the Netherlands has been treating its own citizens of Moroccan and Turk descent. The same people who brightened up at the mention of India, applauding the Indian workers’ discipline and exemplary behaviour while on Dutch soil, barely concealed their animosity towards these two ethnic groups, which were typecast as difficult, and stubbornly different.

Over dinner in Amsterdam, the Indian group met a Dutch professional working at a senior level in a top-notch Indian IT company. He said the nicest things about his Indian employer and his Indian colleagues, calling them role models for all immigrant groups. Then came the unexpected question: “You have heard about the unrest here?” The “unrest” was an allusion to the Dutch frustration at having to “put up” with Moroccans. “The government is not strict with them,” the manager complained, adding a warning against visiting “their areas” because “they tend to carry knives.” During our stay, we repeatedly heard these comments — and from a people once feted for their tolerance but who today unburdened their prejudices before perfect strangers.

The openly expressed rancour was distressing and in complete contrast to the textbook view of the Netherlands as an open and welcoming society, protective of individual lifestyles and almost laissez faire in the freedoms it allowed its religious and minority groups. The Dutch multiculturalism had long been held up as a model for all of Europe for it emphasised co-existence and consensus as against the French insistence on assimilation and the German suspicion of the outsider. The Dutch nation-state was conceived as a polder model, propped up on a number of cultural, religious and political pillars, each fiercely independent, and each legitimately claiming a proportionate share of the national wealth.

In practice, this translated as the Roman Catholics and the different protestant categories going to their own schools, shopping in their specified supermarkets and refusing to go to a hospital run by another religious group. As Rudy B. Andeweg, professor of political science at Leiden University, explained, this strict adherence inevitably led to political affiliations along religious lines with 95 per cent of the Roman Catholics identifying with the Catholic parties and so on: “From the cradle to the grave you would live in a Catholic sub-tube.” The pillarisation worked on the principle that policy-making is best left to the groups themselves.

Somewhere in the 1960s, the pillar model began to wither — and for the ironic reason that it had worked so well. The sub-groups no longer saw one another as threatening, resulting in greater intermingling among a people who suddenly spoke of being Dutch. Today, this collective Dutch identity is posing a threat to immigrant ethnic groups like the Turks and the Moroccans. The assassinations of extreme right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and film-maker Theo Van Gogh in 2004 furthered the divisions — between the native Dutch population now united behind a Dutch identity and the immigrants with their own separate cultural and religious identities. A 2004 Netherlands parliamentary report on integration policy admitted that while a large number of immigrants had integrated entirely or partly, “discrimination in public life” was now a fact.

The positive Dutch attitude to potential Indian immigrants stems partly from India’s upgraded international standing. And partly from the conviction that Indians, disciplined and hard working as they are, will easily adjust to the Dutch way of life. India is so much the current flavour that Dutch citizens of Surinami-Indian origin are today identifying less with Surinam and the Netherlands than with India, a home they left over a century ago. The Surinami Indians are better off than the Turks and the Moroccans. Yet they have not been fully accepted by a country that constantly asks for evidence of their integration. The community resents this and is betting on a closer identification with India to rid itself of the underdog tag.

India must surely feel flattered by all this. Yet sooner rather than later, the Netherlands will realise that upwardly mobile as Indians are they will not give up their identity. Dutch society is in ferment which begs the question: How long before the Indian workforce faces the integration test?