As far as India is concerned, Amnesty International is clearly a force for the evil. Its agenda and actions on the ground so far indicate that its ultimate aim is to destabilise India on all fronts. Going by its own record, we need to pose a fundamental question: what is the evidence that it has done even an iota of good in and to the Indian national interest?
The answer: terrible and diabolical.
Amnesty International has deliberately, consistently deepened fissures in the Indian society by both inventing and escalating internal fault lines using various devices, one of which is manufacturing and disseminating atrocity literature.
In 2015, Amnesty published a scurrilous petition about the rape of two Dalit girls in Uttar Pradesh’s Baghpat region, which was supposedly ordered by the village’s Khap panchayat. The petition generated more than 500000 signatures but the truth was revealed a few days later by a Reuters report:
…members of the village council in the Baghpat region of northern India have told Reuters they passed no such order. Family members of the two sisters also told Reuters they are unsure if the ruling was made. And local police deny any such directive was given.
We could be making a cardinal error if we think that the Reuters corrective report would make any difference to Amnesty's original lie because it was an intentional untruth. We could scream all we want about a sense of fairness, justice, and objectivity but this is how Amnesty will look at it: the Baghpat episode and Amnesty's phony petition will be yet another page in Amnesty’s volumes of atrocity literature against India, which will then become part of the prescribed syllabus in Human Rights and Social Studies and Conflict Studies programmes in various universities both abroad and India. Our own children will read such material and come away convinced that the heroic thing to do is to dismantle the Indian state by waging war against it.
Now, sample this “overview” about India on Amnesty International’s India web page:
Authorities clamped down on civil society organizations critical of official policies, and increased restrictions on foreign funding. Religious tensions intensified, and gender- and caste-based discrimination and violence remained pervasive. Censorship and attacks on freedom of expression by hardline Hindu groups grew. Scores of artists, writers and scientists returned national honours in protest against what they said was a climate of growing intolerance… The criminal justice system remained flawed, violating fair trial rights and failing to ensure justice for abuses. Extrajudicial executions and torture and other ill-treatment persisted.
Undoubtedly, this gives the picture of India as a horrid tyranny, right? And the instances that Amnesty International provides in order to back up all these claims are supplied precisely by the usual suspects: the Lutyens “award wapsi” brigade, the leaders and minions of the India-is-intolerant circus and kindred fellow-travellers. Needless, all of these are inveterate India-haters who would love to see the country break into pieces. Never mind the fact that India allows Amnesty International the freedom enough to actually write all this about India on Indian soil. Had Amnesty’s claims been true, it would’ve received the treatment that Lee Kuan Yew gave it in the past in Singapore.
Indeed, is it atrocity narratives like this that enables US politicians like Eldophus Towns to label India as a “brutal tyranny” on the floor of the House.
If this is on the one side, the other side is even more alarming.
We can begin with the name of Gita Sahgal, whose statement slamming Amnesty was reported by the online portal, Firstpost. This former Amnesty International employee was suspended in 2010 by the organization. The late Christopher Hitchens, in Slate narrates what had transpired back then:
Is "jihad in self-defense . . . antithetical to human rights? Our answer is no." That was how Claudio Cordone, then Amnesty International's interim secretary-general, responded in February 2010 to criticism after the human-rights group made ex-Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg its poster child… Nor was Amnesty bothered that, alongside his "humanrights" work, Mr. Begg was conducting fawning interviews with al Qaeda propagandists such as the late terrorist imam Anwar al-Awlaki… The world needs morally credible human-rights organizations. Amnesty too often isn't one of them.
In fact, given the pattern of Amnesty’s interventions over the years, it seems to be on the side of radical jihadists—early on, from supporting violent extremists in Kashmir and Punjab to Taliban now.
But there’s more.
NGO Monitor’s numerous reports also show how Amnesty International has taken to supporting Palestinian terrorists and has consistently painted the state of Israel as the villain.
One of the reports pointed calls it “Amnesty’s war on Israel.” Indeed, it is worth perusing NGO Monitor’s aforementioned dossier on Amnesty’s damning record of supporting pro-Jihadis both in the Middle East and elsewhere.
In the words of Nobel Laureate David Trimble
One of the great curses of this world is the human rights industry. They justify terrorist acts and end up being complicit in the murder of innocent victims.” His words drew an angry reaction from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, two of the world’s biggest human rights groups, with more than a million members worldwide
As far as India is concerned, Amnesty International’s “human rights” work has been selective to say the least. Apart from completely ignoring the plight of Kashmiri Pandits, Amnesty has been mum about the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Hindus in West Bengal at the hands of both illegal Bangladeshi Muslim infiltrators and local Muslim extremists. It appears as though Amnesty is wilfully blind to this despite the meticulous, detailed and heartrending documentation of this massacre on the Hindu Samhati Global Media website.
This equally applies to Hindu workers and RSS members murdered with alarming regularity in Kerala either at the hands of Communists or Muslims or both. Apparently some lives deserve to be violently extinguished.
Given this historical pattern, it goes without saying that today, Kashmir’s “azadi” might be Amnesty’s focus area, and tomorrow, it could be West Bengal: perhaps all that’s required is for that one spark of separatism to be lit.
So the question that needs to be asked is this: how did we even get here?
As we’ve seen earlier, Amnesty International has invested in India for nearly four decades: recall the US House Representative’s claim that Amnesty was disallowed in Punjab in 1978. What does that tell us? What does it say about our capabilities, even our self-worth, that we allow this kind of Congressional hearings about our internal matters in an alien nation?
There’s just no other way of saying this: we slept, our political class fought with one other, our governments became alphabet soups of warring political factions even as the likes of Amnesty International made slow, steady but sure inroads. In Arun Shourie’s words, the Indian state steadily “hollowed out.”
And it finally caved in during Sonia Gandhi’s decade-long NGO regime where the likes of Greenpeace and Amnesty flourished, the cancer eating India’s vitals. And now, when the Government itself tries to mitigate the situation, it has to face internal and international resistance and hostility on an epic scale.
Indeed, it appears that we’ve remained in a civilizational inertia of meekly allowing the West to lecture us about “human rights” given how the sponsors of these human-rights-advocates continue to bomb entire countries out of existence and are on a spree of plundering the planet.
And so, the fundamental question remains: given what these human rights worthies have done and continue to do, is something like Amnesty International even required in India?
If the answer is yes, then we might as well concede defeat and wring our hands in helplessness at being unable to guarantee our own internal and external security and national integrity.
Concluded
The Dharma Dispatch is now available on Telegram! For original and insightful narratives on Indian Culture and History, subscribe to us on Telegram.
