U.S. Ambassador Criticizes India’s Crackdown on Charities and Activist Groups
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Version 0 of 1. NEW DELHI — The American ambassador to India expressed concern Wednesday about the “potentially chilling effect” of recent actions by the Indian government against charities and advocacy groups. “I read with some concern the recent press reports on challenges faced by N.G.O.s operating in India,” the ambassador, Richard Verma, said in a speech about relations between the United States and India, according to a transcript prepared by the embassy. The abbreviation refers to nongovernmental organizations. The government, which is led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has placed a series of restrictions on some prominent charitable and environmental groups, leaving people working in the field worried about a wider crackdown on activities that for political reasons may be deemed objectionable. In April, the Ministry of Home Affairs added the Ford Foundation to a watch list of donors, obliging the foundation to obtain approval from the ministry for any grants it makes to Indian organizations. The ministry said in a letter that it was acting to ensure that foreign donations were not used to threaten national security. The state government in Gujarat, where Mr. Modi was chief minister until last year, has objected to the activities of a group called the Sabrang Trust, which has received Ford Foundation grants. The trust used the Ford money in part to hold meetings and workshops on religious violence, including the deadly sectarian riots that shook Gujarat in 2002. Kiren Rijiju, the junior minister for home affairs, wrote on Tuesday in response to a parliamentary question that money from the Ford Foundation had gone to groups that were not registered under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act. The ministry canceled the registrations of nearly 9,000 Indian nongovernmental organizations in April, saying they had not filed mandatory annual returns. The ministry also suspended the registration of Greenpeace India and froze its bank accounts, saying the group had violated the law in a number of ways, including underreporting funds it received from abroad. It said Greenpeace India had “prejudicially affected the public interest” and “prejudicially affected the economic interest of the state.” Greenpeace India has warned its staff that it may run out of money within a month and have to shut down. The group said in a news release on Tuesday that it was preparing a legal defense against the government’s “arbitrary attack.” Amitabh Behar, the executive director of the National Foundation for India, which has received more than $6 million from the Ford Foundation in recent years, said that the government’s actions could be “hugely harmful” for the many groups and development activities that the Ford Foundation has supported, including many prominent research and academic institutions. “You can keep thinking and keep counting, the contribution is so immense,” Mr. Behar said. In April, the State Department expressed concern “about the difficulties caused to civil society organizations by the manner in which the Foreign Contributions Regulations Act has been applied,” according to Marie Harf, a department spokeswoman. |