Good FDI, bad FDI

There are good guys and bad guys; most of us with experience and observation get to recognise one from the other. Now there is a far more difficult recognition test coming up: how to distinguish between good FDI and bad FDI.

We know good FDI from countless reiterations in our public life. Foreign direct investment in our industry is good. Foreign direct investment in our infrastructure is good. Foreign direct investment in our aviation sector is now good. Foreign direct investment in the defence sector will now be good. Foreign direct investment in nuclear energy is also good. In fact, FDI is good in almost everything in our national life except in one area. And that’s when it involves NGOs.

Most of you are in the happy position of not having to read the Intelligence Bureau report which if it were a book, would be on the fiction shelves of book stores. But you will have read newspaper reports about it, and all these reports will reinforce your sneaking suspicion that NGOs are fake, or suspect, or worse. This is precisely how public opinion is sought to be manipulated by clever organisations. This time though, the Intelligence Bureau may have been too clever for its own good.

Just look at the timing and presentation of its report on NGOs. It was commissioned by the United Progressive Alliance government when protests against the Russian built Kudankulam Nuclear Plant reached fever pitch in 2012. Yet the report was presented to the new government soon after it took office. Not just that, the report lifted a paragraph without attribution from a Narendra Modi speech of 2006 in which he said, in part, “Funds are obtained from abroad, an NGO is set up; a few articles are commissioned; a PR firm is recruited and slowly with the help of the media, an image is created.” The IB report also went against the usual practice of submitting it without any individual signatures. This time the IB’s joint director Safi A. Rizvi has appended his name to the document.

The IB report is flawed because it makes two significant assumptions. The first is that any agitation against a development project is motivated and therefore bad. The second is that if a foreign organisation like Greenpeace is opposing a “development” project, its motives are suspect. Greenpeace, of course, is an irritant to most governments, but to think that its motives are to subvert India’s interest is absurd. It has been around for over 45 years; founded in the late 1960s to protest against US nuclear testing in Alaska, it now has 40 centres around the world with the objective of ensuring “the ability of the Earth to maintain life in all its diversity”. It has been demonstrating in many countries against global warming, deforestation, over-fishing, commercial whaling, genetic engineering, nuclear power and destruction of the environment.

As a matter of policy — and this is important to note in the present context — it does not accept funding from any government nor from any corporation or political party, its income being derived from the nearly three million individuals who support it as well as well-known foundations with the same objective. Its respectable status is confirmed by the fact that it serves as a general consultant to the United Nations Economic & Social Council. Other prominent NGOs in IB’s firing line are highly respected ones like the People’s Union for Civil Liberties and individuals like former Navy Chief Admiral Ramdas and anti-nuclear activists Achin Vinaik and Praful Bidwai. To accuse them of being “subversive and anti-development” is laughable.

There is no doubt that many NGOs in India are bogus. According to the CBI, 98 per cent of them do not file IT returns. In fact, this is a well known route taken by corrupt bureaucrats in Delhi and elsewhere; they do not ask for a bribe from corporates and the like, they “request” a contribution to an NGO which just happens to be run by their wives.

It will be a massive exercise to identify and weed out these spurious NGOs, but it’s necessary to do so because it gives the whole sector a bad name. Good NGOs are the lifeblood of a democracy. They help mobilise people against headlong development, which can often be to the detriment of the very people it is supposed to help. Rampant illegal mining in Goa, the wanton destruction of mangroves in Mumbai, the earlier depredations in Silent Valley are cases in point.

Is opposition to nuclear power plants anti-national? Ask the people of Fukushima in Japan. Should mining and coal extraction not be controlled? Do corrupt ministers at the Centre and the state not connive with developers and industrialists to damage our cities and our environment? We all know the answers. This is not to say that NGOs are lily-white either. To drive home their point, they often resort to massive exaggeration as Medha Patkar and Arundhati Roy have often done.

Ms Roy, for example, had claimed that over 50 million people would be displaced in India because of dam construction. More rational calculations showed that this figure would be nearer three million. But three million is still a lot of people and who would protect their interest if it weren’t for NGOs?

The IB report, incidentally, says that foreign funded NGOs are “serving as tools for strategic foreign policy interests of Western governments.” The PMO should forthwith ask for more specific information: which NGOs, what strategic interests, which Western governments?

As for foreign funding, it is the lifeline of NGOs because Indian organisations and corporates shy away from anything controversial. And what’s wrong with foreign funding if it is legal and accounted for? Incidentally, a Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh based in Leicester in England and the India Development and Relief Fund based in Maryland in the US, both raise money for “humanitarian work”.

It is said that they collect millions each year without disclosing that much of the money goes to the RSS. If that is permissible, why can’t an NGO receive foreign funds which it does without subterfuge?

The factotums who run the Intelligence Bureau are hoping to be rewarded for their report. They should, instead, be summoned to Delhi and hauled over the coals.

The writer is a senior journalist