There is
an irony in the government’s crackdown on Ford Foundation that seems to have
escaped most observers. In the 1960s, the principal critics of the Foundation
were the Indian Left, which maintained a steady drumbeat of attacks on the
Foundation and its projects in the country, along with a generalised attack on
all such institutions which have played such a significant role in transforming
the country. The critique really takes aim at NGOs and civil society
institutions that provide depth to the Indian democracy. But their role in
promoting education and agriculture has been forgotten.
The deeper
motivation, however, seems to be the same. The Left believed that these groups
were fronts for the US intelligence agencies and their aim was to undermine
India’s non-aligned or independent status. The Sangh Parivar seems to now be
mirroring this belief. It believes that its political trajectory is on the
ascendant and the only forces that can undermine it are foreign powers —
principally from the West. In this, there is a remarkable congruence between
the government of India and the government of the People’s Republic of China,
which, too, has cracked down on NGOs based on a similar belief.
During
the Cold War, some western foundations did play a role in assisting their
respective country’s political objectives. A closer look at the Church
Committee revelations in the 1970s come up with little or nothing with regard
to India. Indeed, Mrs Indira Gandhi was convinced she was being targeted by the
CIA in the run-up to the Emergency, through the funding of Socialists and the
Sangh Parivar by the US.
Ford Foundation,
which has been around since 1951, seems to be targeted because it supported
Teesta Setalvad, who has run an NGO seeking to prosecute those responsible for
the 2002 Muslim massacres in Gujarat. You may argue there is no evidence
linking Modi and his government to the massacres, but you cannot ignore the
fact that the massacres did take place and that scores of people responsible
for it haven’t been punished. Pushing for the application of the rule of law
can hardly be considered a crime.
NGOs like
Greenpeace can be pesky institutions, challenging the might of the state. But
they play an invaluable role in holding up a mirror to the governance and
societal institutions and aid in the process of their transformation. This is
true whether it relates to reduction of hunger, community development, adult
literacy, women’s empowerment, protecting the environment, caste
discrimination, or exercise of arbitrary power.
As for
Ford, one of its key roles was in encouraging the profession of economics by
funding research and training institutions like the Institute of Economic
Growth, Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, the NCAER, IIMs in
Ahmedabad and Kolkata. Among its earliest grants in the early 1950s was to set
up training institutes for village extension workers, rural public health
training centres, and for five agricultural colleges. So intense was the
commitment that Foundation officers were sitting in on planning meetings of the
Delhi University, which got massive funding of over Rs 5 crore to re-organise
its library and its other schools. This was thrice what the UGC was offering
for the five-year plan period. This is just a synoptic rendering of the role
such institutions have played in Indian life.
The
Foundation has not only helped nurture significant academic scholarship in
India, but has also played a role in the intellectual life of the US itself. It
helped create the Public Broadcasting Service and supported arts and humanities
in the country; it promoted desegregation and voter registration of the Black
people. Abroad, it has helped set up the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, and backed
Palestinian NGOs. It has followed an essentially liberal agenda, which has been
criticised by conservatives in the US. And now, we are seeing a similar phenomenon
in India.
Neither
the Left, nor the Right seems to have much confidence in the Indian people, who
have displayed a feisty sense of independence, and nor do they realise that
manipulating the politics of a vast and diverse country like India is not a simple
task. It is one thing to back the Colour Revolutions in eastern European
countries, which are the size of an Indian state, and quite another thing to
deal with a country which is a continent in itself and is a flourishing
democracy. And more often than not, such manipulation usually backfires — as
was evident in the case of Iran in the 1980s and Ukraine today.
There is
one thing the government and critics of foundations and NGOs fail to realise.
India of 2015 is not the India of the 1950s or 1970s. We are a self-confident,
resilient society with institutions that have gained considerable depth;
communications technology has bound the country far more securely than it ever
did in the past. More than that, we are also a transparent and open society
where backroom deals and manipulation are not easy to implement.
Mid Day April 28, 2015