In quick succession, the government has painted itself into two embarrassing corners. By putting the Ford Foundation on a prior permission watchlist in the interest of national security, it is inviting international ridicule. Earlier, it had amused the international community by imposing travel restrictions on a Greenpeace activist, an approach to managing dissent that fell from grace with the close of the Middle Ages, and which must reliably fail in the age of pervasive communications.
In pursuit of its stated aim of building capacities and institutions, the Ford Foundation provides financial support for research programmes in at least 10 institutes of national importance, including an IIT, an IIM, the Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. In addition, its earliest interventions in India included the development of physical infrastructure like Kennedy Hall at the Aligarh Muslim University. To suggest that the foundation’s interests are spurious or disreputable brings all these institutions — and senior staffers handling funds — into similar disrepute. And since the Indian government has frequently contributed to these projects or founded the organisations in which they run, the interests of government officials who okayed the Ford Foundation’s financial support begins to look suspect, too. This is a tricky corner for a government to be in.
