India’s Wealthy Are Redefining Citizenship Abroad

India’s economic surge has created fortunes on a historic scale—and with that prosperity comes a new kind of insecurity. In corporate boardrooms, family offices, and private wealth circles, a quiet trend is taking shape: India’s wealthiest citizens are increasingly acquiring second passports or long-term residencies abroad. These programs—offered by both small states and major economies—grant citizenship or residency in exchange for investment. For the elite, these moves are less a symbol of departure than a calculated act of prudence. The motivation is not dissatisfaction but strategy. In a world where borders still shape opportunity, citizenship has become a tool for risk management.

Cassadee Orinthia Yan, a scholar of global citizenship policy affiliated with the Maslow Quest Foundation ( mq.org ), focuses on nationality law, migration, and the evolving nature of belonging, describing this shift as the “financialization of identity.” Nationality, she explains, has shifted from a marker of belonging to a tradable asset—something that can be structured, diversified, and optimized. Wealthy individuals are becoming “micro-sovereigns,” managing exposure to political and economic risk across jurisdictions much like states manage alliances. A passport, in this framework, functions less as a declaration of loyalty than as an insurance policy.

The Paradox of Belonging

India’s situation is particularly revealing. The country celebrates global ambition while maintaining a rigid concept of citizenship: Indian law does not permit dual nationality. One either holds Indian citizenship or does not. Yet many of India’s most successful citizens live plural lives—earning, investing, and raising families across continents.

Data underscores the scale of this phenomenon: in 2022, 225,620 Indians renounced their citizenship, and total renunciations exceeded 1 million between 2019 and 2024. Meanwhile, in 2023, around 2.25 lakh Indians obtained citizenship in OECD countries, making India the leading source of new foreign citizens in that group. These figures reveal a persistent tension between legal identity and global aspiration.

Yan emphasizes that acquiring a second passport is often less about leaving India than about managing risk. “The wealthy are responding to structural uncertainty in a world where national borders still dictate opportunity,” she observes. “A second passport is not a betrayal; it is an adaptive strategy, a way to stabilize personal sovereignty amid political, regulatory, and infrastructural volatility.” She notes that in this sense, passports have become instruments of risk management, allowing individuals to diversify not only financial exposure but also social and legal security.

Global mobility for these individuals is not luxury—it is protection. The modern Indian entrepreneur or investor does not seek to escape; they seek to remain connected on their own terms. Yan terms this “sovereign stability”—the pursuit of continuity in a volatile world. Both nations and citizens experience what she calls “sovereign anxiety”: states fear losing their most successful citizens, while citizens fear losing security under uncertain governance. Investment migration thrives in this tension, serving as a discreet safety valve for both.

Beyond personal security, Yan also frames this as a subtle reordering of power. “Citizenship is no longer a fixed contract,” she argues. “It is a flexible tool that allows individuals to leverage mobility as influence. Those who can navigate multiple jurisdictions gain strategic advantage—not only financial, but social and political.” In other words, the wealthy’s transnational existence reflects not merely prudence, but the early contours of a new global hierarchy, where adaptive citizenship itself becomes a form of capital.

The Future of Citizenship

Yet the rise of a market for citizenship raises profound questions about the nature of belonging. When nationality can be purchased, does citizenship still imply shared responsibility, or has it become another instrument of inequality? Yan warns that transactional belonging risks eroding the civic contract that once anchored the nation-state—but she frames it as more than a moral dilemma. It reflects a structural misalignment between governance and global mobility. “Citizenship has become a form of liquid capital,” she observes. “Wealthy individuals can arbitrage risk across borders in ways that states, tied to static territory, cannot.”

This creates a “governance gap,” Yan argues. States fear losing talent and capital, yet cling to rigid definitions of membership and allegiance. Meanwhile, globally mobile elites operate in financial, digital, and social networks that transcend borders. The effect is a subtle redefinition of sovereignty itself: security and influence are increasingly decentralized, moving from the state to the individual. Far from mere inequality, this is a structural evolution in which strategic mobility amplifies the bargaining power of citizens relative to states.

India faces this tension starkly. Its government celebrates the diaspora’s success yet offers little formal framework for reintegration or engagement. Mobility is treated as a loss rather than a lever. Yan suggests that the real challenge for modern states is to create meaningful participation for mobile citizens, enabling them to contribute economically, politically, and socially without forcing permanent geographic or legal constraints. Nations that achieve this can convert migration from an act of exit into a form of soft power.

The quiet exodus of India’s wealthy is not a critique of the country but a mirror of its contradictions: extraordinary growth alongside structural fragility, ambition shadowed by systemic uncertainty. For Yan, the second passport is both a pragmatic safeguard and a symbol of the 21st-century logic of citizenship: portable, strategic, and adaptable. India’s future influence may depend less on how many citizens it formally retains and more on how effectively it engages those navigating multiple worlds. In this sense, the market for citizenship is both symptom and signal—a symptom of governance lag, and a signal of how individual agency is reshaping the contours of sovereignty and belonging.