Ashish Kothari - The Ministry for Hounding Activists
"Recently EAS Sarma, former Secretary to the Government
of India and a petitioner in the above case, wrote to the Cabinet Secretary
with these telling words: “I find that the MHA has shown unusual speed and
alacrity in proceeding against NGOs under the FCRA but it has not apparently
displayed the same enthusiasm and passion in proceeding against the political
parties that have accepted illegal donations from foreign companies, violating
the same FCRA.”
NB -The author has omitted mention of the vast funds going to Hindutva and 'Islamic' NGOs. I have added some observations below the article - DS
The recent government crackdown on Greenpeace in particular,
and the activism sector in general, reeks of arbitrariness and illegitimacy,
says Ashish Kothari in a scathing critique. The question is will the people
give in to the state’s tactics?
Civil society organisations are gearing up for possibly one
of the most important struggles of resistance since the Emergency in the
mid-1970s. At stake are the democratic freedoms of speech, dissent and
association, all guaranteed to us in one way or the other by the Constitution
of India, and all threatened by a government that wants to brook no challenge
to its agenda.
Ham-handed attempts by those in power to muzzle dissenting
voices have been around for many years, especially by relatively intolerant
state governments. Branding activists as ‘anti-national’, ‘Naxalite’ or
‘Maoist’ is a way to publicly discredit them, and several states have gone
further in detaining, imprisoning, and charging them under various penal or
armed forces or terrorism laws. A softer but often equally effective method has
been to suspend permissions or special status under income tax or foreign
funding laws.
A prominent case was the freezing of the foreign funding
bank account of the Indian Social Action Forum (INSAF) in April 2013 by the
Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). INSAF is a platform for over 700 social action
groups and activists and their accounts were frozen upon allegations that its
activities were ‘prejudicial to the public interest’.
At that time civil society rallied around INSAF, with over
340 organisations and activists issuing a strongly worded letter that said: “We
stand with INSAF in asserting the constitutional right of every citizen of
India to participate in governance, which includes the right to question,
challenge and oppose the policies of the state through peaceful, nonviolent and
democratic means.” (The letter is reproduced in Economic and Political Weekly,
15 June 2013). INSAF moved the Delhi High Court, which struck down the MHA’s
action on the grounds that no substantial reasons had been given to justify it.
In general, though, till now central government has not been
so trigger-happy in the use (or rather, abuse) of such provisions. The present
government, however, seems to be going much further out on a limb after civil
society organisations. A series of actions in the last few months have alarmed
the activist and voluntary sector in the country, and triggered increasing
attempts at getting together to resist this attack.
The Greenpeace incident :
One of these, prominently in the news over the last few weeks, and
personally known better to me, is the move by the Ministry of Home Affairs
(MHA) to direct closure of all bank accounts of Greenpeace (GP) India. The
closure came after the MHA issued a notice suspending GP India’s registration
under the Foreign Contributions Registration Act (FCRA), alleging various
violations of the law.
The FCRA suspension has been justified on a number of flimsy
grounds, mostly procedural, each of which GP India should be able to defend.
The notice even contains half-truths and outright lies, for instance that GP
India sponsored Channel 4’s trip to Mahan Forests Ground Zero, for a campaign
against destructive mining proposed by Essar which would have destroyed forests
and the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people. It also alleges that the
organisation sponsored the election campaign of Aam Aadmi Party candidate
Pankaj Singh (who had resigned from GP India before he entered the fray).
Even if in one or two cases there may have been mistakes,
these are easily verifiable as honest errors any organisation can make; for
example, the omission of a figure in a hard copy of the audit returns, which is
clearly a typographic mistake because the correct figure shows in the online
submission, a fact the MHA conveniently hides.
Can the BJP (or any other party for that matter) show all
its accounts to the public, and assure us that there has not been a single such
lapse on its part? Why has the MHA not moved against political parties (both
the BJP and Congress) that have taken funds from foreign organisations
(specifically from the notorious Vedanta through its Indian subsidiaries), an
allegation that was accepted as valid by the Delhi High Court in 2014?
On 28 March 2014, the court asked the Government of India to
take action against both parties within six months. No action has been taken,
of course. A BJP spokesperson’s subsequent response in a television programme
was that the party has returned the money to the contributor, as if that
exempts it from being prosecuted for violation!
Recently EAS Sarma, former Secretary to the Government of
India and a petitioner in the above case, wrote to the Cabinet Secretary with
these telling words: “I find that the MHA has shown unusual speed and alacrity
in proceeding against NGOs under the FCRA but it has not apparently displayed
the same enthusiasm and passion in proceeding against the political parties
that have accepted illegal donations from foreign companies, violating the same
FCRA.”
The real dynamics: No, the MHA action against Greenpeace India is not about
legal violations, it is more related to the fact that GP India and other such
groups are indeed hurting the “economic interests” of some parties, in this
case the corporations that are close to the government. In the kind of projects
that are opposed by movements and groups like GP India, the State believes that
its interests are coterminous with the interests of India’s economic and
political elite, including corporations.
Coal mining, thermal power stations, nuclear stations and so
on, have been repeatedly shown to be dirty, dangerous, damaging to public
health and not necessarily providing greater energy access to the poor. But
they do mean enormous profits for a few. Alternative routes to energy security,
such as decentralised renewable energy (GP India has itself shown a working
model for a full village in Bihar), do not interest the state
and corporations as much, because these can be under community and citizens’
control, minimising legal and illegal profit-making.
Essar, Adani and other corporations that GP India has taken
head on in India and outside are close to the powers-that-be in Delhi; their
pressure must be one reason the government is going hammer and tongs after GP
India. It is instructive that GP India first learnt about the MHA’s
suspension notice from the media; this was also the case with the two
Intelligence Bureau reports against civil society in mid-2014. Is this a new
tactic meant to scare civil society -- ‘leak’ such news to the mainstream media
first, plant doubts in the minds of readers/viewers of such news, and hope that
there will be public lynching of NGOs making the government’s job easier?
Whatever happened to the due process of allowing these NGOs to respond to
allegations first?
This is yet another indication that the government is not
after the truth, neither is it acting to hold NGOs accountable to the law, but
is, in fact, using alleged legal violations as a cover for all-out intimidation
and harassment.
Others in the line : Soon after its action
against Greenpeace India, the government has also moved against a number of
donor agencies. Ford Foundation has been told it will require permission for
each grant it makes, the ostensible reason being that it may be funding
activities that are outside its mandate or in ways violative of the law. A far more likely reason, however, is that Teesta Setalvad’s
organisation Sabrang Trust has received some Ford Foundation funding, and she
is as everyone knows, a big thorn in Modi’s flesh, having squarely pointed to
his complicity in the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat.
Whether the government’s allegations of specific legal
violations by both Greenpeace India and Sabrang Trust are valid or not is for
these organisations to respond to, and perhaps for a court of law to
adjudicate. But it is clear that they are being targeted not for these but for
spoiling the party for corporate or communal forces close to the government,
which seems increasingly paranoid about allowing freedom of speech and dissent.
In an economic model of ‘growth’ that puts the priorities of
corporations above everything else, and has no necessary correlation to poverty
eradication and job creation, all hurdles have to be dealt with using such
tactics. One of the favourite strategies is to label groups as ‘anti-national’,
something that has always been easy in India if the relevant organisation is
protesting against ‘development’ projects and taking foreign funds. It is used
even when the government is fully aware that the majority of GP India’s funds
are from Indian citizens (70,000 of them!).
Who wins?: Unfortunately, these tactics have already worked to subdue
many NGOs, especially those who are scared about their FCRA status or other
measures by government agencies. In a recent petition initiated by Kalpavriksh,
expressing concern regarding the actions against Greenpeace India,
representatives of several organisations said they would sign personally but
not as an organisation; others did not respond at all. Nevertheless, the petition
got over 180 endorsements, many from organisations.
This shows that the government’s scare tactics won’t work
with peoples’ movements and groups like GP India, for a simple reason which the
government has perhaps overlooked. These movements and groups have solid public
support. It is interesting that in all these months of the attempt to vilify
and publicly lynch GP India, the number of Indian citizens supporting it both
financially and by signature campaigns, has shown an increase in some months.
Other responses are also cause for hope. A broad front of
civil society organisations to take on the government is in the making; this
formation (as yet informal) is also putting into place support structures for
groups that are threatened with illegitimate government actions on their
foreign funding or tax status. The relatively independent part of media has
also had the courage to stand up for the truth, and the judiciary, at least in
the cases involving INSAF and Greenpeace India, has done its job of defending
fundamental democratic rights.
Lest it be misunderstood that I am painting all of India’s
civil society in an uniformly rosy light, let me categorically state that there
are indeed many bad eggs amongst ourselves: NGOs that are running money-making
or empire-building rackets, NGOs that do not comply with statutory provisions,
and so on. But this does not in any way take away from the analysis that the
government’s recent actions are arbitrary and illegitimate, and aimed more at
‘troublesome’ groups than those who are doing illegal things.
The Indian people will not take lying down the new avatar of
the MHA as a Ministry for Hounding Activists. In any case, the more the
government goes out on a limb to catch troublesome groups, the harder it is likely
to fall when the limb cracks under the weight of its own contradictions. It
should learn that lesson from Indira Gandhi’s disastrous Emergency experiment.
For example, in 2000, the first NDA government had attempted
surreptitiously to subvert the protections of Schedule 5: <http://www.pucl.org/reports/
Thus, reason and experience show that all decisions by governments and
state officials may not always be in the interests of the people of India; or
that there is every possibility of a conflict between some political ideal of
'national progress' upheld by the government, and the lives and interests of
people in localities and scheduled areas. In sum, there is no way out of such
conflicts except via dialogue with statutory institutions (such as gram sabhas)
as well as civil society groups. Some of these may be NGO's in the sense the
term is now used, but many may just be popular organisations, which have every
right to protest and resist activity that destroys their life pattern. In such
cases, if 'national interest' is invoked by officials and ministers, the people
have every right to define the national interest otherwise. A democracy must
evolve ways to settle such disputes without bloodshed and injustice. If the
national leaders deploy force to settle them, its a simple observation that the
state will be perceived as an alien force, performing tasks for the rich and
powerful.
Here is a former IAS official on NGO's
http://www.epw.in/commentary/
Nivedita Menon - When Are Foreign
Funds Okay? A Guide for the Perplexed
Maja Daruwala - How India treats its NGOs
Maja Daruwala - How India treats its NGOs
The Indian state is the biggest recipient of foreign
funds; moreover, there are very large NGO's that are affiliates of the
so-called mainstream parties. Vast sums of money have been donated to Hindutva
organisations, as well as organisations working for Christian or Muslim
charities. I have no doubt some of these are engaged in promoting fundamentalist projects, but it would require research to establish this; and how far
they have attempted to influence the Indian polity. It is debatable whether the VHP may be
defined as a charitable organisation devoid of political interest. Yet it has enjoyed a tax holiday from 1990:
DS