Opinion Blame game

Karnataka government’s new directive frames Congress swing to other end of pendulum on NGOs.

September 16, 2014 02:00 AM IST First published on: Sep 16, 2014 at 02:00 AM IST

A couple of months after an Intelligence Bureau report to the prime minister’s office concluded that non-governmental organisations have cost India 2-3 per cent of its GDP, the Congress government in Karnataka has decided to join in the blame-the-NGO game. It has not only asked all NGOs in the state to come clean on the source and subsequent use of the foreign funds they receive but also tasked the state police to investigate their role in “agitations in the last five years”. Those working in the fields of forests, wildlife, or with tribal communities will come in for stricter scrutiny. The police is taking its cue from a Congress legislator’s claim in the assembly that NGOs in the state had, since 2006, funnelled a large part of foreign funds to stall nuclear, hydroelectricity and irrigation projects.

As this paper has pointed out earlier, casting NGOs as the potholes on the smooth highway to development shows a skewed understanding of the processes of governance. It is in the nature of civil society organisations to articulate the interests of smaller groups, and that often sees them taking adversarial positions to government policy. It is within their rights to lobby against development projects or red-flag the cost of progress, and that is one of the ways alternative perspectives find expression in a democracy. It is for the government — whether at the state or the Centre — to decide which of those views and arguments to accept or reject. In tarring all advocacy groups as beholden to vested interests, the Karnataka government is, in effect, shutting its ears to the sometimes raucous, sometimes illuminating, chorus of dissent that it ought to engage with. And by setting the police on their trail, it is signalling an outrageous intent to intimidate.

For a Congress government to do so is doubly ironic. When in power at the Centre, the UPA allowed the “wisdom” of the National Advisory Council to influence, and even derail, government policy. Swinging to the other extreme in Karnataka is no less unwise.