Hillary Clinton's proxy war on Narendra Modi, a window on the abuse of NGOs

NGO or ngo -- acronym for a nonprofit, ostensibly nongovernmental organization, although many NGOs in this era are actually GONGOs -- a NGO controlled by a government or created entirely for that purpose; i.e., a phony NGO.

Obama quietly reverses Hillary’s ‘get Modi’ policy
By MADHAV NALAPAT
April 19, 2014
The Sunday Guardian (India)

(NEW DELHI) US President Barack Obama has quietly reversed a policy initiated by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to "get Narendra Modi" — ostensibly for the 2002 Gujarat riots, but in actuality "for taking stands that may be different from that favoured by the US administration" — in the words of a senior analyst in New York.

"Hillary Clinton likes to operate through NGOs, which are given funding through indirect channels, and which target individuals and countries seen as less than respectful to her views on foreign and domestic policy in the target countries," a retired US official now based in Atlanta said.

He claimed that "rather than US NGOs, (the former) Secretary of State Clinton favoured operating through organisations based in the Netherlands, Denmark and the Scandinavian countries, especially Norway" as these were outside the radar of big power politics.

[...]
These present and retired officials claimed that "during the tenure in office of Secretary Clinton, several expert teams in the guise of NGOs were sent to Gujarat to try and find mass graves". The purpose was to then take the matter to the Office of the UN Commissioner of Human Rights in Geneva as an example of genocide.

"In 2011, some bones were discovered in a Gujarat field by one of the search teams and there was much excitement, but these were later found to be buffalo bones", an official said.

The official added that "no evidence whatsoever of mass graves was uncovered in Gujarat despite six years of clandestine searching for them" by undercover experts posing as representatives of NGOs. He added that "five politicians, three from the state and two in Delhi, assisted the search teams, but the information given by them proved unproductive".

Finally, "now that Secretary Clinton had stepped down from office, by end-2012 orders were given to stop wasting time on the search for mass graves in Gujarat, much to the dismay of those NGOs who were getting significant funding as a consequence of the search operations".

[...]

Coming back to the BJP's PM candidate Narendra Modi, these sources say that the Obama administration has dialled back on the hectic efforts by Hillary Clinton to paint the Gujarat CM as guilty of mass murder and even genocide.

"This is clear from the latest report of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, which has sharply scaled back its criticism of the Modi government as compared to earlier reports".

According to a senior official, "President Obama does not share Hillary Clinton's confrontational approach and her preference for Sonia Gandhi, and is looking to establish a pragmatic partnership with India should Modi become the Prime Minister".

Hence the search "for a US envoy who would be different from (former ambassador) Nancy Powell's Clinton-style hostile approach to Modi, and to find an individual who could be expected to bond with the new PM and his team". According to these sources, President Obama "is alarmed at the steep downslide in India-US ties caused by Hillary-style crusades, and wants the relationship to be even better than what it was under the Bush presidency".
[...]

I've omitted juicy passages about some other abuses of NGOs related to various government scandals in India, but I can't resist adding this detail:   

Interestingly, the senior official claimed that because of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's inability to water down the Nuclear Liability Act, and Defence Minister A.K. Antony's decision to prefer the French Rafale fighter to its US rival, "orders were given to activate the Khalistan file so as to create embarrassment for Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh".

So after all that scheming and plotting, Sonia had to be thrown under the bus anyhow.  

From a long distance it's funny, but there's nothing funny about the weaponization of winning ideas related to promoting a healthy democracy. Whether it's civic organizations, NGOs, massed nonviolent demonstrations -- you name it, there are creeps who will find a way to corrupt it for their own purposes. When the creeps are in government or have strong ties with government, the situation can be very dangerous, and always strikes a blow against democratic society.   

The methods of corruption have become ever more devious and sophisticated, as the Clinton caper illustrates. Yet Nalapat's report, which couldn't have been published even a decade ago, shows that the creeps are finding it ever harder to operate in the darkness of public inattention.

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