A favourite hobby of the South Asian ruling class is blaming foreigners for their own failures. Because the ‘evil foreign hand’ theory is an effective way to divert attention and curb dissent in a region with a deep history of conquests and colonisation. Indira Gandhi and Zia ul-Haq were paranoid individuals with dictatorial tendencies. In the shadow of the Cold War, both passed despotic laws against civil society and the Opposition by raising the spectre of coups funded by the US or Russia. In Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal, leaders still blame India when things go wrong.

The US was the big, bad, foreign hand in post-colonial, socialist India. But after the end of the Cold War and India’s turn to Washington, we became frenemies. We now woo American investors, presidents and defence companies; we tom-tom the “strategic alliance between the world’s two largest democracies”; we talk of a democratic axis against the rise of China. Yet, dig a little deeper, and the Cold War-era mistrust persists.

The Indian political class sees a conspiracy behind dollar support for environmental activists and organisations that demand greater political transparency. Americans get frustrated that we don’t appreciate their universal do-goodism, which is sometimes naïve or condescending. Insecure nationalism meets white man’s burden. Stupidity ensues.

Conspiracy theories

On Tuesday, the Modi government cancelled the licences of 8,975 foreign-funded NGOs, for allegedly not filing their annual returns. Last week the government put the Ford Foundation under a watch list and directed the Reserve Bank of India to take a clearance from the Home Ministry before approving any funds for the New York-headquartered organisation. Among Ford Foundation’s beneficiaries have been Teesta Setalvad and Arvind Kejriwal, both thorns in Narendra Modi’s side.

In March, the government stopped a Greenpeace activist from travelling to London and followed that up by freezing the organisation’s bank accounts for alleged violations of the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act (FCRA). The FCRA was first promulgated by Indira Gandhi in 1976, withdrawn, and then re-enacted more stringently by the Manmohan Singh government in 2010.

And not just NGOs, the draconian FCRA restricts judges, journalists, legislators, bureaucrats and election candidates from accepting ‘foreign contributions’ except under some very specific circumstances. Repeatedly the FCRA has been used by the government to harass and silence voices that do not toe its line.

Cutting across parties, the message from India’s leaders is this: dollar-funded infrastructure is great, but dollar-funded dissent is anti-national. Foreigners can make profits in India, but cannot ask for greater accountability or a better environment from the government.

This is silly logic. Because if you follow the money trail, you see that the same global business elite who invest in India, who we roll out the red carpet for, are also the biggest donors to these NGOs. This is merely a natural outcome of the cycle of global capitalism and philanthropy that we have joined. There is no Crypto-Church-CIA-Jihadi-NGO conspiracy out there to enslave us Indians.

The way out

At the heart of the problem lies the unwillingness of India’s traditional billionaires to philanthropically fund organisations that seek positive change in the governance and policy space. As the biggest beneficiaries of crony governance, India’s business elite wants to maintain the status quo. Why would an Ambani Foundation want to fund an anti-corruption watchdog or an environmental organisation? So the well-meaning activist who wants to start an NGO in this space has to go to the Ford Foundation.

But there is a breeze of change in India. Economic liberalisation has thrown up many first-generation high-networth individuals. Having made their money transparently, they are likely to donate to organisations that are fighting for a cleaner system. If that does happen, then there will be pressure on the crony billionaires to follow suit.

In the early 20th-century US, it took naming, shaming and muck-raking journalism before Gilded Age billionaires like the Fords, Carnegies and Rockefellers took to philanthropy to rebuild their image. These billionaires who were vilified for their shadowy business practices ended up creating some of the world’s most respected grant-making organisations.

In 1913, John D Rockefeller, owner of the Standard Oil Company, set up the Rockefeller Foundation, which is today one of Greenpeace’s top donors. Ford Motor Company founder Henry and his son Edsel set up the Ford Foundation in 1936. Now, private charity contribution is 2.2 per cent of GDP in the US, compared to an abysmal 0.4 per cent in India. And grants in the governance space would be a tiny fraction of that tiny fraction. India ranks 133 in the World Giving Index, even below Bangladesh (109) and Nepal (115).

So before we amputate the foreign hand, we must ask ourselves: Is an Indian hand ready to fill the void? Even a prosthetic would do.

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