Non-governmental organisations in India

"In addition to these parallels, Israel and India share the distinction of being targets of political manipulation by powerful non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and their funders, which operate outside the democratic process, with no checks and balances. These activities, although often presented in altruistic and moral terms – such as peace, human rights, economic development, and humanitarian aid – are widely perceived in both countries as a form of neo-colonialism. NGO power is also enhanced by an image of altruism and morality (known as the “halo effect”) that protects the organisations and their funders from critical analysis. International journalists, diplomats, and academics give NGOs automatic support, without examining details and hidden agendas, which undermine hard-won national sovereignty and independence."

"Responding to these concerns, in 2010, India passed legislation known as the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act (FCRA), which prohibits the use of overseas funds for “activities detrimental to the national interest.” Criticism was directed at groups such as the Ford Foundation, which, according to the claim, were using the cover of economic development to manipulate Indian culture. Christian aid groups were also suspected of proselytising activities. For example, in March 2017, US-based Compassion International, which funds child development projects in India, was accused of missionary-like activities by the Indian government and has been blocked in its ability to fund projects and placed on the list of organisations requiring “prior permission to bring in funds from overseas” (Mohan, 2017). Similarly, in 2016, the FCRA refused the registration renewal of the Indian Social Action Forum (Insaf), which is funded in part by “Brotfuer die Welt” (a major Protestant aid group) and by a French government “solidarity” organisation."

"It is always easy to blame the state and the men in uniform. But Islamic terror essentially does not emanate from uniforms and state power, but from a belief system which even the ordinary people have been fed. That is why a lot of Islamic terror never gets recorded by human-rights organizations like Amnesty International. A Christian Pakistani friend complained to me that Amnesty had not spoken out against the religious persecutions in his homeland, even when these are a grim and undeniable reality. The fact is that much of this persecution and discrimination is not ordered by the state (the type of culprit with which Amnesty is familiar), but is a spontaneous attitude among sections of the Muslim population, egged on by nothing except the omnipresent Islamic doctrine."

"Nonetheless, it does almost look like the situation of a colonized nation when you consider the enormous cultural power wielded in India by Western, now mostly American-based, NGOs, think-tanks and institutions of higher learning. They have rarely been set up in order to serve some imperial goal, yet they still embody a very colonial psychology. They still think that India has to be lifted out of its own barbarism. They give themselves a civilizing mission, constantly nurtured with atrocity literature to justify the treatment of Indians as backwards in need of tutelage. But today, this “native barbarism” has been redefined in terms of human rights. American India-watchers and India-meddlers analyse Hinduism as a litany of human rights violations, and present themselves as the saviours whom India’s many oppressed categories have been waiting for."

"Most of these 'leftist' human rights organizations, with their predilection for stout defence of the 'human rights' of predator entities, are, more often than not, financed mainly by American sources linked with rightist 'international' American foundations and organizations promoting rightist American agendas. So it cannot basically be a 'left' versus 'right' issue"

"Some folks I know made pretty neat fortunes this way, setting up NGOs and 'think-tanks' ostensibly to study and 'work with' 'oppressed communities', and raked in vast amounts of money from gullible foreign donors. In fact, barring a few really committed souls, a whole host of 'progressives' in the NGO, academic and media world, made their living out of the misery of the 'oppressed', earning in this way not just their daily bread but also the really serious money that they needed to buy their cars and houses and to send their children to the 'best' English-medium schools and then for higher studies to the USA (which they never tired of reviling in public, of course), where they, too, would often sojourn when their 'social activism' became just a bit too tiring, boring or bothersome. Not many of them, who never ceased showing-off their 'commitment' to the 'oppressed' communities and their visceral hatred for 'oppressor' castes, would, I suspect, want to be treated in an Adivasi-run nursing home or to send their children to a Muslim-run school."

"Today, the Khanna project is widely seen, as historian Matthew Connolly puts it, as an example of ‘American social science at its most hubristic’… The Khanna study took place in the early 1950s. Its failure – the fact that its results confirmed the exact opposite of what researchers hoped – led the Rockefeller Foundation to distance itself from its methodology, but not from its objectives. In years ahead, the foundation funded numerous anti-fertility programmes in India and elsewhere, earning the growing animosity of physicians and poverty activists who felt that the foundation’s efforts to control population growth ignored the realities of the persistent poverty that makes large families so indispensable to Indian villagers."