Can India-Taiwan ties withstand backlash over Indian migrant workers?
While Taiwan looks for ways to diversify its labour pool with Indian workers high on that list, civil society and the opposition have come in with scaremongering tactics that may jeopardise Taiwan’s steady relations with India. Academic Ghulam Ali weighs in on the issue.
The unofficial relationship between Taiwan and India, which had been steadily deepening for several years, faced a sudden jolt as the Taiwan government began to recruit the first batch of 1,000 Indian migrant workers set to arrive by the end of 2026 under a memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed in 2024.
This raised concerns among segments of Taiwanese civil society and the opposition regarding the safety of women, driven by (mis)perceptions associated with India. A surge of online petitions, debates across social media platforms, commentaries and opposition voices demanding greater scrutiny pushed the issue to the centre of the public debate, revealing how domestic politics can disrupt even strategically aligned partnerships.
According to some Indian scholars, China’s “hostile” attitude pushed India to deepen ties with Taiwan.
India-Taiwan ties have been steady
Prior to this controversy, the relationship between India and Taiwan had quietly expanded on the back of their shared concerns about China. In India, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi since 2014 and in Taiwan, the government of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) since 2016, adopted a tougher tone towards China, establishing a strategic foundation for their relationship.
The relationship correspondingly deepened alongside the deterioration of China-India relations from the mid-2010s, especially after the 2017 Doklam standoff and the fatal clashes in the Galwan Valley in June 2020. According to some Indian scholars, China’s “hostile” attitude pushed India to deepen ties with Taiwan.
Both sides found synergy in India’s Act East Policy and Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy (NSP), while cooperation in semiconductors, electronics manufacturing, artificial intelligence and renewable energy expanded.
India took a more assertive stance by omitting explicit references to the “one China” policy from joint statements with Beijing — without formally renouncing it — and cautiously tested the waters in the South China Sea through political signalling and a limited naval presence.
In 2024, India’s permission for the establishment of the third Taipei Economic and Cultural Center (TECC) in Mumbai, as well as Prime Minister Modi’s public acknowledgement of Taiwan President Lai Ching-te’s congratulatory message on his third term — and New Delhi’s refusal to retract it despite Chinese pressure — were widely regarded as bold moves. This was the third TECC, following two already established in New Delhi and Chennai. India is the only South Asian country to host a TECC, Taiwan’s de facto embassy-level representative office.
Moreover, Taiwan’s participation in high-profile Indian security forums such as the Raisina Dialogue, its growing role in India-focused supply-chain and critical-technology initiatives aligned with the broader Quad-driven Indo-Pacific agenda, and expanding think tank dialogues collectively made Taiwan an increasingly salient factor in India’s China and Indo-Pacific calculus.
As a result, two-way trade reached US$12.5 billion in 2025, representing a 17% increase over 2024.
The petitioner opposed bringing labour from a country that lacked transparency, held starkly different values on gender equality, and could potentially put Taiwanese women’s safety at risk.
Taiwan needs to diversify its source of labour
Taiwan’s dynamic economy faces the challenge of a shrinking population. Like many other countries with similar conditions, it relies on migrant workers, with currently around 900,000, mainly from Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Thailand.
With India seeking new overseas employment opportunities for its workforce and Taiwan aiming to meet its labour demand through more diversified sources of foreign labour, and to strengthen people-to-people exchanges, both sides signed an MOU on labour force cooperation in 2024 to recruit Indian workers.
The MOU faced scrutiny even during the planning stage, and as the programme advanced with the first phase of 1,000 Indian migrant workers, it sparked controversy across society and opposition circles
Petition against the MOU with India
On 3 April, a petition was launched on the Public Policy Online Participation Platform calling on the Ministry of Labor to halt the plan and prioritise “public safety and gender equality”. By late April, it had received over 40,000 signatures. The petitioner opposed bringing labour from a country that lacked transparency, held starkly different values on gender equality, and could potentially put Taiwanese women’s safety at risk.
The petition referenced the 2018 Thomson Reuters Foundation survey of 550 experts on women’s issues, which ranked India as the world’s most dangerous country for women, ahead of Afghanistan and Syria.
It also questioned India’s police-clearance procedures, arguing that many perpetrators of sexual assault against foreign tourists in India had no prior criminal record and would therefore pass background checks. On this basis, it raised concerns about the credibility of India’s administrative system and the rigour of its document-issuance procedures for meeting Taiwan’s high standards for public safety.
Opposition joins the fray
The challenge for the Taiwan government intensified as the main opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT), backed the petition, labelling the move “highly risky”. The KMT also cited statistics from India’s National Crime Records Bureau, reporting 445,256 crimes against women in India in 2022, including more than 31,000 cases of sexual assault, which it said amounted to about 85 cases per day. It further stated that out of roughly 900,000 migrant workers in Taiwan, about 93,000 had “absconded”. The government, it argued, should prioritise resolving existing issues in its immigration and labour management system rather than introducing a new wave of workers from India.
While the DPP government acknowledged challenges in the labour market, it stated that the proposal for Indian migrant workers had previously been discussed by the Legislative Yuan, including opposition parties, and was subject to the same strict regulations applied to workers from other countries.
Some Indian commentators, however, described the Taiwanese societal reaction as an instance of racism based on stereotypes rather than reality.
Doubts from India about racism
The pro-DPP Taipei Times criticised the petition and the opposition for selectively using crime data. It argued that the Indian diaspora was the largest globally with no consistent pattern of sexual violence or public safety risk, whereas nearly 6,000 Indian nationals were already residing in Taiwan without any unpleasant incidents.
During this uproar, the Indian government largely remained quiet, leaving the issue to Taiwanese authorities to avoid drawing attention to an embarrassing narrative about women’s safety in India. Some Indian commentators, however, described the Taiwanese societal reaction as an instance of racism based on stereotypes rather than reality.
In this controversy, timing matters. Taiwan is nearing the November 2026 local elections. Both the opposition and the ruling party are likely to shape their narratives about Indian migrant workers around electoral considerations rather than long-term policy priorities.
Taiwan’s relations with India may deteriorate
More importantly, the controversy emerged amid improving Sino-Indian relations after several years of heightened tension. Over the past decade, a key driver of Taiwan-India ties has been the deterioration in Sino-Indian relations. If that external driver weakens, the relationship’s structural basis becomes more fragile. Improving Sino-Indian relations could constrain New Delhi’s Taiwan policy, given that Taiwan is a red line for China.
The Indian migrant worker controversy highlights a key constraint: strategic convergence cannot offset domestic political resistance. The issue has arguably affected the NSP, which was aimed at people-centric engagement with regional countries, as well as Taiwan’s industrial policy to address labor shortages and its relationship with India — at least at the level of perception. The future trajectory of India-Taiwan ties will depend as much on domestic political management as on shared concerns about China.
