Bharat Bhushan - Why Narendra Modi hates NGOs
The Narendra Modi government has suspended the registration
of Greenpeace India under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act, 2010, (FCRA)
for 180 days, preventing it from receiving any foreign funds. Earlier it had frozen
the bank accounts of Greenpeace for alleged financial irregularities. It has
also placed the Ford Foundation on its watch list for allegedly funding
organisations not registered under the FCRA. This came after the Gujarat
government sought action against the agency for “direct interference… in
internal affairs of the country and also of abetting communal disharmony in
India.”
There is nothing new in harassing inconvenient civil society
organisations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) by denying them FCRA
clearance. Past governments have also done this. Yet there is a renewed vigour
with which the Modi government has been targeting NGOs, ostensibly based on a
report of the Intelligence Bureau which accused NGOs of “using people-centric
issues to create an environment which lends itself to stalling development
projects”. The government has since gone out of its way to stigmatise them,
thwart their free movement and erode their credibility.
Perhaps Mr Modi’s dislike of “five-star NGOs” stems from his
experience of activists taking up the cases of the 2002 Gujarat riots and of
extra-judicial murders of alleged terrorists in the state. It could also be
that Mr Modi, who came on a pro-corporate platform, does not want
“people-centric issues” to hamper development. It may also come from the fact
of his being roundly defeated in Delhi by a ragtag group of NGO activists who
formed the Aam Aadmi Party.
The antagonism to NGO activism, however, is not limited to
the Prime Minister. It extends to the Bharatiya Janata Party and its Hindutva
affiliates. But why is this antagonism not shared by other political parties —
especially those that were a part of the United Progressive Alliance, which was
no less corporate-friendly?
The UPA, in fact, brought them into policy-making through
the National Advisory Council (NAC). It recognised that legislators often
represented little more than personal interests and patronage networks. Some
UPA leaders, therefore, thought it prudent to invite the leaders of various
mass struggles inside the political tent. It was through the NAC that the UPA
was able to put social inclusion at the heart of its policies.
The NAC became an institutionalised space for giving voice
to the marginalised and the dispossessed. It made the government and Parliament
look like sensitive democratic institutions as a result of path-breaking
rights-based legislations, like the Right to Information Act of 2005, the
National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005, the Forest Rights Act of 2006,
the Right to Education Act of 2009, the National Food Security Act of 2013, and
the Land Acquisition Act of 2013. The point is that the Congress-led UPA was
able to strengthen its focus on inclusive development using social sector NGOs
for brainstorming.
Why don’t the BJP and Prime Minister Modi do the same? What
explains their inability to listen to civil society organisations and to
chastise those who say that something needs to be done about rampant poverty,
malnutrition, lack of health facilities and sanitation? The reasons are both
historical and structural.
The origins of the BJP and before that, of its predecessor,
the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, are in fact in an NGO parent-organisation — the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The RSS, despite its quasi-paramilitary culture, is
the largest and most powerful NGO in the country. It has spawned hundreds of
NGOs of its own. Their influence extends from the deepest interstices of
India’s social structure to almost all the organs of the state.
The RSS, with its own brand of Hindu nationalism, has always
been suspicious of secular organisations. The exclusivist notion of Hinduism as
“Indian-ness” developed by V.D. Savarkar and the RSS itself, developed in the
context of the Hindu-Muslim riots of the 1920s and in the aftermath of the
pan-Islamic Khilafat Movement supported by the Congress and Mahatma Gandhi, and
perceived by Hindu radicals as a threat to Hindu society. The RSS still
believes that the “Hindu nation” is under threat from the minority Muslims of
India and proselytising Christians. The RSS is suspicious of any organisation
that challenges its ideological space anywhere. It is threatened by all
agitations organised around a rights-based approach which pushes religious
identity into the background and foregrounds secular identities — such as
landless or marginalised tribals.
Those who promote any collective identity other than that of
the “Hindu nation” are seen as enemies — they include trade unions, feminists,
LGBTs (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender), communists, secularists,
non-Hindu religious organisations, tribal rights activists, oustees of big
projects, and non-RSS groups organising farmers and agricultural workers. They
are seen to be creating conflict by bringing in extraneous identities to bear
on what is essentially presumed to be a harmonious Hindu society — ignoring its
caste and class stratifications.
In its own extensive work with marginalised peoples, the RSS
tries to draw them under the Hindu umbrella. In doing so, it must face the
challenge of the fault lines created by “others” — the “enemies” of the Hindu
nation and the political ideologies inimical to it. These other organisations
bring social-economic indicators into the discussion to demand justice,
equality. They do not hesitate to formulate demands as sectional interests
based on social fault lines.
The UPA government took social movements on board because it
believed that this bridged the crisis of political representation. The BJP and
Mr Modi on the other hand think that social movements are already represented
in the party through its connections with the RSS NGOs. Appointments to
government and quasi-government educational and cultural bodies are made from
this pool of NGOs.
This accounts for the difference in attitude of the UPA and
the BJP towards civil society organisations. In a continuing ideological
struggle for space in society, non-RSS NGOs are, therefore, discredited by them
or even crushed by accusations that they discredit India internationally. However, choking their sources of funds, deriding them and
eroding their legitimacy — as the BJP and Prime Minister Modi himself are
trying to do — can only shrink the democratic space in society.
India is not a “Hindu” society as imagined by the RSS and
try as they might, the votaries of Hindutva do not represent the diverse
identities with their myriad problems that make up this amazing democratic
nation of India.
The writer is a journalist based in New Delhi
