‘Bharat Mata needs your talent’: Sridhar Vembu urges Indians in US to return amid ‘hellhole’ row

Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu urged the Indian diaspora in the United States to consider returning home, saying India’s global standing will increasingly depend on its technological strength and ability to retain talent.

“As difficult as it is for many of you to contemplate this, please come back home. Bharat Mata needs your talent,” he wrote in a post on X on Monday.

In his post Vembu addressed Indians living in America, warning of a perceptible shift in sentiment against immigrants, particularly in the technology sector. He said a “significant number of Americans” now believe Indians “take away” jobs — a perception he said is unlikely to change meaningfully with electoral cycles.

“You may think the next election will fix this, but your choice would be between people who hate our Bharatiya civilisation and people who hate civilisation itself,” Vembu wrote, describing what he sees as a deepening ideological divide in the US between the “hard right” and the “woke left”.

Linking respect to India’s rise

Vembu’s remarks come against the backdrop of a fresh controversy triggered by Donald Trump
sharing a podcast clip that referred to countries such as India and China in derogatory terms during a debate on birthright citizenship. The episode has reignited concerns over how Indians are perceived abroad amid an increasingly polarised immigration debate in the US.

In his post, Vembu argued that global respect for Indians would be shaped less by diaspora success and more by India’s own economic and technological progress.

“If India remains poor, the woke left will give us moral lectures with pity and the hard right, different moral lectures with scorn (‘hellhole’) and we must not confuse either with respect,” he said, adding that prosperity, security and international standing ultimately stem from a nation’s technological prowess.

Reverse brain drain

Highlighting India’s long-standing talent outflow to the US, particularly in technology, Vembu said the country produces sufficient “brain power” but has historically exported much of it. Building domestic capability, he argued, is essential for India to assert its “civilisational strength”.

Calling for what he described as a “missionary zeal”, he urged Indian professionals abroad to bring back their expertise and leadership to help guide the country’s young population towards sustained economic growth.