Political lobbyists are pretending to be NGOs & fooling tax dept.

 Jaitirth Rao in The Print

There has been quite a bit of noise about the current dispensation being against what is referred to as “civil society”. One expects this kind of diatribe from illiberal Lefties. But such is the stranglehold of these ideas and ideologies that this slanted view has now started gaining wider traction. The principal objection seems to be that the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act 2010 is being weaponised against some NGOs. This and related issues are worth examining in some detail.

When the Congress-led UPA 2 introduced draconian provisions in the FCRA law in 2010, I had gone on record opposing it. My article on that issue is available in the public domain. I mention this because I want it to be clear that I am not the usual adversary — the “fascist” supporter of the FCRA.

The FCRA is supposed to regulate foreign contributions. It has a provision that if foreign funds are received by an NGO, then the latter is required to use it for its own charitable purposes. The funds are not to be diverted to other NGOs or charity organisations. Based on the advice of some dubious and clever chartered accountants, some NGOs, instead of making contributions to other non-profits — which they are now prohibited from doing — have come up with an “innovative” solution. They are “paying” other NGOs for “services”. These services are usually in the grey and ambiguous domain of “consultancy”. Now, clearly, the NGOs are trying to “indirectly” achieve what the law prohibits them from doing “directly”.

None of these NGOs are babes in the woods. They are acquainted with common law cases. There are hundreds of cases in the US, a country close to the purse strings of these NGOs, saying that it is impermissible to do indirectly what is not permitted directly. How can it be that if the Indian State invokes a common law principle so clearly enunciated in the US, it suddenly becomes a fascist enemy of decent NGOs? As it turns out, virtually all the regulatory action against foreign-funded NGOs has been for this reason. 

Don’t tread where MNCs failed

As someone who has dealt with tax authorities in nine different countries over the last 49 years, let me assure the clever chartered accountants advising these NGOs that corporations and banks have been experimenting with these devices and playing with these loopholes for decades and have rarely, if ever, succeeded. The amateurish attempts by these NGOs to fool the tax department are going to get them nowhere. Where large multinational corporations (MNCs) have failed, NGOs should not tread.

Several ill-advised NGOs have gone one step further. They have tried to pretend that contributions received from their foreign donors have not been donations but payments for the elusive consultancy services rendered by their Indian arms for their foreign payments. Such obviously foolish attempts are bound to get them into trouble. There is no point in complaining after the fact.

Foreign-funded NGOs are welcome in our country if they wish to perform “charitable” acts like helping the visually challenged, the terminally ill, or the differently abled. As a country, we have been reasonably kind in supporting causes like leprosy alleviation or livelihood creation, even if the ultimate aim behind these good deeds has been religious proselytisation. In this regard, we have gone against the dictums of MK Gandhi who vociferously opposed “do-good” missionaries. But when foreign-funded NGOs start getting involved in political lobbying in India, we have a problem.

Some of us are old enough to remember that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) subsidiary, the NGO known as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, funded Indian magazines like Quest in the ’50s and ’60s. Some of us have also read the testimony of Soviet Union archivist Vasili Mitrokhin who regularly made sure that more copies of Russian translations of Hindi poets were printed and “sold” than their Hindi originals. This too happened in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. Again, some of us remember that the head of the Ford Foundation in Delhi could get on to Jawaharlal Nehru’s calendar easily and that some of our tragicomic policy initiatives came from this august institution. Foreign-funded NGOs trying to tell us what taxation policies we should follow are really pushing their luck. And that is exactly what several of them have done before and are doing right now. Fortunately, one of them is now under a regulatory scanner. The Indian State, as is usually the case, has been dilatory. But better late than never.

The anti-State menace

Foreign-funded NGOs and foreign media have been against the Indian State and any strong dispensation for more than 70 years now. They prefer pusillanimous clientelist governments in India. They pilloried Panditji for his soft stance with the Soviets during the 1956 Hungarian revolution. They are now upset that we are not as anti-Russia as they would like. They have also made a devil’s bargain with blatantly Islamist organisations such as the US-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

This is why they prefer to refer to Indian Muslim gangsters as politicians. They talk of trigger-happy police officers in India. There are, of course, no such officers in the US. They prefer to characterise the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 as obnoxious and anti-Muslim. I beg to differ. The Act is in favour of persecuted religious minorities in India’s neighbouring countries. These NGOs and the media do not bleed for Sikh shopkeepers, Hindu girls, and Parsis in our neighbourhood. They support the quixotic “farmers’” agitation in India when everybody knows that it was a “middle-man” affair. And they are silent about Canada’s blatant persecution of its truckers.

Let us now revert to our own domestic uncivil society. Under the previous dispensation, a bunch of impractical Lefties got together. They had never run factories or created jobs but managed to ingratiate themselves with the powers that were and became members of the pompous National Advisory Council (NAC). Their “advice” usually resulted in the active sabotage of the intelligent policies that Manmohan Singh was trying to implement. One feels sorry for Singh, who had to constantly look over his shoulders to avoid being bitten by this overweening Dracula. The combined NGO menace got so bad that the hapless former PM, in an interview to Science journal, blamed American NGOs for sabotaging the India-US nuclear deal, which had the support of the elected governments of both countries.

The simple fact is that the so-called civil society NGOs, who had support from the NAC and who could defy Singh quite easily, are now defanged and stand without protection. All that they can do is write strong pieces in the English press in India and appeal to their patrons in foreign papers to give them some oxygen. There is an old English saying: “They say, let them say…”

Call them by their right name

It is interesting to note that for the illiberal Left, references to “civil society” almost invariably mean references to NGOs, many with explicit political agendas. Are Sangeetha Sabhas, Bhajan Mandalis, regional associations (like Kannada Sangha in Mumbai, Maratha Mandali in Chennai, Odiya Sahitya Sabha in Bengaluru, Durga Puja Association in Pune), and traditional charities (like the Red Cross, Saint Judes, National Association for the Blind) not part of civil society? If any of them run afoul of tax authorities, will there be any media coverage? The French traveller Alexis de Tocqueville makes reference to voluntary organisations as being central to the American democratic experience. To this day, more the three-quarters of the fire brigades in American small towns and suburbs are manned by volunteers. Churches and synagogues organise charitable activities. Rotary, Lions, and Giants clubs are part of civil society as also oddly enough is the Masonic Lodge.

All of these institutions derived their funding from members of their immediate physical communities. This is the civil society that de Tocqueville praised. He would be shocked if told that quasi-political lobbying groups who obtain money from foreign countries in order to influence American politics were to be referred to as members of the voluntary, citizen-supported civil society, which he held up as exemplars of grassroots democracy.

We need to get our vocabulary right and refer to political lobbyists by their correct name. Our ancients told us that getting the right “nama-rupa” or “word and form” will automatically make our arguments solid. When we revert to that tradition, it will be clear that genuine members of civil society are not complaining. Political lobbyists are indulging in grievance-mongering, which I hope and pray we quietly ignore.

"Indian Courts Enjoy Power without Responsibility" - Time for a New Constitution? (Hindi)

An Alternative View

 

Julian Assange - The Democrats scapegoat?

G Sampath in The Hindu

To blame Donald Trump’s victory on Julian Assange or, for that matter, on Russia, not only amounts to a refusal by the Democrats to take responsibility for Hillary’s defeat but is also an insult to the U.S. electorate.

One of the most banal tropes of Hollywood blockbuster trailers is about one man pitted against an all-powerful enemy, and ultimately prevailing. The figure of the lone ranger battling on with his back to the wall is a popular figure of American pop culture. How ironic, then, that this very figure seems to have become the bane of the country’s righteous political establishment.

So one man, holed up in the embassy of a tiny Latin American nation, a man who hasn’t seen much sunlight in four years, who is under round-the-clock surveillance, and is subject to arbitrary denial of Internet access, has managed to swing the presidential election of the most powerful country in the world in a direction it ought not to have gone. Or so we are told by influential sections of the Western press.


From revolutionary to villain
The past week or so has seen a spate of articles on the so-called unravelling of Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. They suggest that Hillary Clinton lost the U.S. presidential election because of him. Backing this logic is the allegation that WikiLeaks served as a conduit for disseminating documents obtained by hackers working for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The leaked emails and documents of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) published by WikiLeaks were damaging enough to spark the resignation of top Democratic Party officials, including the DNC chair and the communications director. These leaks, the argument goes, ruined Ms. Clinton’s electoral prospects, thereby paving the way for Donald Trump’s triumph.

The Democrats have been saying since July 2016 that their servers were attacked by Russian hackers. Last week, the U.S. intelligence community (USIC) officially confirmed the allegation. Kremlin has dismissed the USIC’s charges as “unfounded”. While President-elect Donald Trump seemed to acknowledge that Russia may have been involved in the cyber-attacks, he has maintained that it had no impact on the elections. Mr. Assange has denied that he got the leaks from Russia, and claims that his source was not a state party. In such a scenario, what one believes boils down to who one believes, which, in turn, depends on one’s political or ideological allegiances — the quintessential “post-truth” situation.

However, the extraordinary spectacle of erstwhile liberal hero Assange and current liberal nightmare Trump on the same side of the American political divide, with each appearing to endorse the other’s claim that Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks, had one immediate outcome: it prompted the American liberal elite to question Mr. Assange’s motives, and cast him as the villain who collaborated with Mr. Putin to interfere in the U.S. elections and ensure a Trump victory. For them, the USIC’s official statements are proof of Mr. Assange’s culpability, attesting to his metamorphosis from idealistic cyber-revolutionary to opportunistic charlatan.

It must, no doubt, be tempting, and rather convenient, for Democrat supporters to pin the responsibility for Ms. Clinton’s defeat on anyone but the Democrats themselves. But there are several problems with this narrative.

Flaws in the ‘trial’

For starters, both the declassified report of the USIC and the “Russian dossier” leaked allegedly by a private firm make claims of Mr. Putin’s involvement in the DNC hacks without presenting supporting evidence. The excerpts from the latter, published by some media outlets, were unverified quotes by anonymous spies. None of the claims has been independently authenticated by a media outlet. And no reason has been given why reports of Western intelligence agencies should carry more credibility than the denials of the Russian Foreign Ministry.

Second, are Mr. Assange’s motives or credibility the issue here? If we assume that they are, then we cannot avoid subjecting his accusers — the American press and intelligence agencies — to the same test.

In the 10 years of its existence, WikiLeaks has published more than 10 million classified documents. Till date, there is not a single instance where its material has been found to be false or inauthentic. On the other hand, sitting in judgment on Mr. Assange today are the same media outlets and the same intelligence community that sold to the public what is arguably the most egregious lie in the history of journalism — about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — which helped justify a needless, destructive war that consumed tens of thousands of civilian lives, dismembered a country, and hatched several terrorist organisations.

Perhaps it is because the authenticity of the DNC leaks is beyond question, and their content raises difficult questions about the Democratic Party establishment — questions easier avoided -- that the response has turned ad hominem, focussing on Mr. Assange instead.

It may or may not be true that Mr. Assange worked with Russia to publish the DNC leaks with the aim of ensuring a Clinton defeat. Let us assume that he did. Does it then constitute an act of villainy or moral trespass?

One could respond, as Mr. Assange has, with two arguments. First, that American interference in the democratic processes of other countries is well documented. Therefore, it is not tenable to hold that other nations do not have the right to pay back in kind.

Second, Mr. Assange believes that it is his moral responsibility to do whatever he can to prevent a Clinton victory. He has said many times that Ms. Clinton is a warmonger, that her victory would lead to greater American military involvement outside its borders, and thereby impose greater misery on the people of the world.
Liberal commentators have dismissed his statements as his “Clinton obsession” and the delusional ranting of a paranoid eccentric. And yet, a recent report in The Guardian cites U.S. Defence Department data to the effect that in 2016 alone, the Obama administration dropped 26,171 bombs, or three bombs an hour. In this context, it is hardly immoral for anyone to want to deploy his resources to steer America’s presidential choice toward a candidate who he thinks might be less of a military interventionist. From this viewpoint, which Mr. Assange appears to hold, undermining the Clinton campaign by sharing secret information that is of public interest constitutes a perfectly legitimate enterprise. Interestingly, Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The New York Times has acknowledged that the internal DNC emails published by WikiLeaks were newsworthy, and it is quite likely that mainstream publications would have published them had they got hold of them first.


It was about new information

What Mr. Assange did — the act for which he is undergoing trial-by-media — was to supply relevant but new information about an electoral candidate so that the American voter could make an informed choice. One could argue that he did what the mainstream media was supposed to do but wasn’t doing enough of.

In the event, it was the American voter who made the final choice, a choice that may or may not have been influenced by the material published by Mr. Assange. At any rate, thanks to the leaks, it was a choice made with more information than less. No one who believes in the accountability of political parties should have a problem with that. Therefore, to blame Mr. Trump’s victory on Mr. Assange or, for that matter, on Russia, not only amounts to a refusal on the part of the Democrats to take responsibility for the defeat, it is also an insult to the American public that has delivered a mandate from the limited choices it was given.

If Mr. Assange must be criticised, it must be for not giving enough bang for the buck, as it were, for his whistle-blowers. He ought to be doing more to ensure that his data troves are systematically analysed and organised in a user-friendly format, with the significant bits sifted out from the routine ones. But the bulk of the data on WikiLeaks’ servers continues to be inaccessible to the public even as they remain in the public domain. Second, he is yet to match the scale of his U.S.-centric leaks with similar disclosures on its geopolitical rivals such as Russia or China.
However, to blame him for Ms. Clinton’s defeat, or to brand him a Trump supporter, is to wilfully disregard his track record. Mr. Assange’s politics has been clear from the day he founded WikiLeaks, and it hasn’t changed since. He believes that the biggest threats to democracy and freedom are the twin phenomena of mass surveillance for the powerless and secrecy for the powerful. He has made a career out of reversing this paradigm: transparency for the powerful and anonymity for the dissenting citizen. His personal motive for publishing the DNC leaks, whatever it may be, is evidently not one that is inconsistent with his stated mission of making secrecy a losing proposition for governing elites.

Americans can spot election meddling because they’ve been doing it for years

Owen Jones in The Guardian

As I write, president-elect Donald Trump – soon to become the most powerful individual on Earth – is having a tantrum on his Twitter feed. Losing the popular vote can have devastating consequences for a bigoted plutocrat’s ego, and accusations that Vladimir Putin’s regime intervened to his advantage are getting him down. “The ‘intelligence’ briefing on so-called ‘Russian hacking’ was delayed until Friday,” he claims (falsely, apparently), “perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!”

Did Putin intervene in the US election? It is entirely plausible, although evidence from the CIA (with its dubious record) and the FBI needs to be carefully scrutinised, whatever our feelings on Trump. And if the Democratic establishment pin the supposedly unthinkable calamity of Trump’s triumph on a foreign power, they will fail to learn the real lessons behind their defeat.

That doesn’t mean alleged interference by the Russian regime shouldn’t be taken seriously. Putin heads a hard-right, kleptocratic, authoritarian government that persecutes LGBT people, waged a murderous war in Chechnya, and has committed terrible crimes in Syria in alliance with Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship. It is a pin-up for populist rightwingers across the west, from Trump to Ukip, from France’s Front National to Austria’s Freedom party. Its undemocratic manoeuvres should be scrutinised and condemned.

But while Americans feel justifiably angry at alleged interference with their political process, they have also been handed a mirror, and the reflection should disturb them.

For the US is a world leader in the field of intervening in the internal affairs of other countries. The alleged interference is far more extensive than hacking into emails belonging to unfavoured political parties. According to research by political scientist Dov Levin, the US and the USSR/Russia together intervened no less than 117 times in foreign elections between 1946 and 2000, or “one out of every nine competitive, national-level executive elections”.

Indeed, one cannot understand US-Russian relations today without acknowledging America’s role in the internal affairs of its defeated cold war foe. As Stephen Cohen puts it, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the approach of US advisers “was nothing less than missionary – a virtual crusade to transform post-communist Russia into some facsimile of the American democratic and capitalist system”.

As soon as Bill Clinton assumed the White House in 1993, his experts discussed “formulating a policy of American tutelage”, including unabashed partisan support for President Boris Yeltsin. “Political missionaries and evangelists, usually called ‘advisers’, spread across Russia in the early and mid-1990s,” notes Cohen: many were funded by the US government. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser, talked of Russia “increasingly passing into de facto western receivership”.

The results were, to put it mildly, disastrous. Between 1990 and 1994, life expectancy for Russian men and women fell from 64 and 74 years respectively to 58 and 71 years. The surge in mortality was “beyond the peacetime experience of industrialised countries”. While it was boom time for the new oligarchs, poverty and unemployment surged; prices were hiked dramatically; communities were devastated by deindustrialisation; and social protections were stripped away.

To the horror of the west, Yeltsin’s popularity nosedived to the point where a communist triumph in the 1996 presidential elections could not be ruled out. Yeltsin turned to the oligarchs, using their vast resources to run an unscrupulous campaign. As Leonid Bershidsky puts it, it was “a momentous event that undermined a fragile democracy and led to the emergence of Vladimir Putin’s dictatorial regime”. It is even alleged that, in 2011, Putin’s key ally – then-president Dmitry Medvedev – privately suggested the election was rigged. In the run-up to the election, Russia was granted a huge US-backed IMF loan that – as the New York Times noted at the time – was “expected to be helpful to President Boris N Yeltsin in the presidential election”.

Yeltsin relied on US political strategists – including former aides to Bill Clinton – who had a direct line back to the White House. When Yeltsin eventually won, the cover of Time magazine was “Yanks to the rescue: The secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin win”.

Without the chaos and deprivations of the US-backed Yeltsin era, Putinism would surely not have established itself. But it’s not just Russia by any means, for the record of US intervention in the internal affairs of foreign democracies is extensive.

Take Italy in 1948: as the cold war unfolded, the US feared that a socialist-communist coalition would triumph in Italian elections. It barred Italians who “did not believe in the ideology of the United States” from even entering the country; funded opposing parties via the CIA; orchestrated a massive propaganda campaign, including millions of letters from Americans of Italian origin; and made it quite clear, via the State Department, that there was “no further question of assistance from the United States” if the wrong people won. Its efforts were a success. This was the first of many Italian elections featuring US interference.

CIA concludes Russia interfered to help Trump win election, say reports



Take the CIA’s self-professed involvement in the military coup that overthrew democratically elected secular Iranian president Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953: it was “carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government”, as the agency later confessed. The nature of the 1979 Iranian revolution cannot be understood without it. Or what of CIA backing for Augusto Pinochet’s murderous overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973?

There are more recent examples too. Take the military overthrow of Honduras’ Manuel Zelaya in 2009. The then secretary of state – a certain Hillary Clinton – refused to describe the toppling of Zelaya as a “military coup”, which would have required the suspension of US aid, including to the armed forces. Rather than call for Zelaya’s reinstatement, Clinton called for new elections. US assistance – including military aid – continued as dissidents were treated brutally; as death squads re-emerged; as violence against LGBT people surged; and as widely boycotted unfair elections took place.

Allegations of Russian interference in the US elections are undoubtedly alarming, but there’s a double standard at play. Meddling in foreign democracies only becomes a problem when the US is on the receiving end. The US has interfered with impunity in the internal affairs of so many other countries. The day that all such interference is seen for what it is – a democratic outrage, unworthy of any great nation – will be a great day indeed.