Members of South Asian communities making banners at the kitchen table. (Photo supplied)

The Indian community is now the third-largest ethnic group in Aotearoa, part of a larger South Asian diaspora.

Ara Alam-Simmons argues that these growing communities should show solidarity with Māori rather than aligning with the colonial state’s depiction of them as model minorities.

At Holi, a Hindu festival held in early February, the prime minister Christopher Luxon thanked the South Asian diaspora for their contributions to New Zealand.

He said: “In a world where we need a lot more unity and tolerance of diversity and all of that good stuff, a big thank you to our South Asian diaspora. You have made New Zealand a much better place, richer culturally, socially [and] economically.

“Your contribution to New Zealand is incredibly special. We know how hard you work. You often take on two or three jobs to get that first house, first business. You are a great role model to all New Zealanders, and that’s why we are so grateful to you in this community.”

Crowds cheered at what seemed like a fairly innocuous message, celebrating the contributions of immigrant labour, and casting these communities as hardworking, compliant, dutiful, and successful — despite the odds.

Our South Asian communities receive such messaging regularly and consistently. And it’s easy for us to be hoodwinked by such language.

It’s a message that values South Asians primarily as an economic unit and frames us as monolithic, flattened, model minority communities.

This is a corrosive message that must be resisted.

Luxon’s words reflected a broader settler colonial narrative, which praises immigrant labour for making New Zealand “a much better place”. The recognition is conditional on such communities remaining compliant and contributing their low-paying labour.

That same week, Luxon reinforced the idea that Māori are secondary in the narrative of building a better New Zealand. Just a few days before praising the Hindu community at Holi, he was absent from Waitangi after refusing to be there for this year’s Waitangi Day celebrations.

It seems that diversity is acceptable as long as it serves the economic needs of the state without challenging the status quo. For the prime minister, during Waitangi week, it was South Asians who were making the country “richer culturally, socially and economically”, being celebrated for their “hard work”, and for being “role models” to “all New Zealanders”.

Can you imagine him saying those same things about Māori?

It feels like Māori are more relevant to Luxon as entertainers on the global stage. He took a kapa haka group to India with him last week. I found this cringeworthy given his government’s methodical dismantling of Māori rights.

Language shapes worlds and narratives that stretch into our collective futures. His framing puts South Asian communities in opposition to Māori communities, who continue to fight for justice on their own land.

It appears that, for Luxon, diversity is more about assimilating immigrant communities to align with the economic needs of the country.

It’s natural, of course, for our South Asian communities (and other communities) to want to be accepted by their adopted countries. But when they hear these positive messages often enough, they begin to believe them. For those who are busy toiling and surviving, there is no time to pause and reflect on what these messages really mean, and how their status as a so-called “model minority” plays into harmful narratives about the undeserving “minorities” who refuse to conform. Many will be unaware of the historical context behind the claims of an Indigenous people who never ceded sovereignty. This can lead to behaviour that harms those people.

One example is retail crime reform. Sunny Kaushal, an Auckland-based Indian-born business owner, is chairing a ministerial advisory group for victims of retail crime. The group was established in 2024 to provide ministers with independent advice and recommendations.

This is the same Sunny Kaushal who in 2023 advocated for sending “14-year-old ratbags” to military-style boot camps as a “circuit breaker”. He also said: “Youth crime is not the fault of Captain Cook.” And, “Kiwis went through two World Wars, the great depression and the 1980s reforms without smashing up a corner dairy.”

Such comments deny the ongoing historical legacies that settler colonialism has left on present-day Aotearoa. The implicit suggestion is that if Pākeha have been able to survive hardships, there are no excuses for Māori. This thinking isn’t unusual among South Asians. Across our communities, there are few opportunities to connect and be in meaningful relationships with Māori in everyday situations that offer alternative truths. We’re just not part of each other’s lives, generally speaking.

One of the advisory group’s proposals is to give shop owners more power to detain suspected shoplifters. Māori voices appear to be absent in these recommendations.

Indians and, more broadly, South Asians involved in such reforms (whether it be in health, education, or anywhere else) need to reflect on the real impacts of their participation. We should be vocally advocating for policies that address the root causes of crime, such as poverty and the cost-of-living crisis, rather than aligning ourselves with policies that perpetuate racial profiling and create further opportunities for harm.

This type of settler colonial programming turns the screws on already faulty beliefs, entrenching an attitude of: “If they don’t care, why should we?”

It also harms the South Asian diaspora itself — which is great news for the colonial project. The British may have physically left India after 200 years of colonial rule, but the scars left by their occupation remain in the psyche of those it dominated.

During their rule of India, the British became adept at weaponising Indian groups against each other, which included exacerbating the impacts of caste, and playing on differences in people’s ethnicities and religious affiliations. Caste, as a way of categorising people, was particularly important. The caste system sets out rules on who someone can marry and socialise with, and the type of work they can do. It is a hierarchy that keeps people in their place, locked into a structure that serves those at the top. Many Indians were also forced into indentured servitude — better described as slavery — and sent to work in places such as Fiji, Africa and the Caribbean.

The colonial project of exacerbating division didn’t just end when the British left. These divisions became deeply ingrained across the diaspora — and if you’re part of the diaspora, as I am, you know there is very deep work to do to unpick the indescribable levels of violence done. When you couple this history with hearing colonial messaging against a minority in a settler colony, it’s easy to feel invited into a narrative of division.

I also get a feeling that this government is primarily engaging with a particular section of the Indian diaspora — the section that does not care about, nor concern itself with, the fight for Indigenous rights of Māori.

Given the growing South Asian diaspora here in Aotearoa — Indians now make up the third largest ethnic group in the country — the question is this: How can we resist continued colonial programming and pay attention to what is not being said about the realities of tangata whenua in the places where we are?

Our responsibility must go beyond symbolic displays of solidarity and critically engage with the systems that harm tangata whenua.

I write this knowing that, as communities, we struggle to even show up for one another.

Alastair McClymont, the lawyer for Daman Kumar, a New Zealand-born Indian teenager who was facing deportation, recently expressed his deep frustration over the Indian community’s reluctance to speak up for the Kumar family. Aside from a few voices, the community was largely silent. He observed that there was a “desire not to upset the government, to not interfere with their ability to take a selfie with an important government minister or to brag to all and sundry about having lunch with the prime minister. Like all good colonial subjects, the priority is to be seen as being an obedient lapdog to their colonial masters”.

We must question our own actions, whether in politics, business or everyday life.

We need to confront the fact that we are “settlers” too.

We have plenty of examples to draw from across Aotearoa of people refusing colonial programming.

Hana Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke rejected the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill in Parliament, as many thousands also refused its intent by walking the streets in mass protest during hikoi mō Te Tiriti. 

Then there was Malay-Tamil Nabila Husna Abdul Rahman’s powerful submission against the bill, where she drew parallels between the treatment of Indigenous peoples in her home country of Singapore, and Aotearoa.

Community activist, Dr Sapna Samant, works with the Indian community to encourage  understanding of what it means to be tauiwi.

Duality, a Sri Lankan youth support group, rallied over 150 people to submit against the bill. They drew on lessons from their own colonial history, including the Kandyan Convention of 1815, where colonial powers manipulated language to strip sovereignty from one of the kingdoms, allowing the British to consolidate their control over all of Sri Lanka.

A group of Bangalis and others from the South Asian diaspora created a Toitū Te Tiriti banner holding multiple languages (Urdu, Sri Lankan Tamil, Farsi, Bengali, Malayalam, Gujarati, Punjabi, Hindi, Marathi) to demonstrate support at hīkoi.

These are but a few examples.

Our collective future in this country depends on our willingness to show up — not as obedient subjects of the Crown, but as those who refuse to participate in the settler colonial project of disenfranchising Māori on their own whenua.

We need many more from across our South Asian diaspora who call Aotearoa home to show solidarity. Not enough of us are yet showing up, and we know it.

The colonial project won’t end for any of us here in Aotearoa if we don’t.

Ara Alam-Simmons, centre. (Photo supplied)

Ara Alam-Simmons is a second-generation British South Asian who was born and raised in the UK. Aotearoa has been home for just over two decades.  

E-Tangata, 2025