The frequency of attacks on India has gone up in recent times. A dishonest attack was launched when Article 370 was neutralized.
Houston, Texas: Some affiliate organizations of the United Nations seem to have embarked on a program of targeting India with a constant barrage of hostile propaganda. The latest attack is in the form of an expression of fake concern on the part of the United Nations Special Rapporteurs, who claim that India’s new IT rules, which impact large technology firms like Twitter, do not meet international norms on privacy and freedom of expression. India is right to curb the activities of Twitter as it has become a foreign quasi-governmental entity that seeks to interfere in Indian politics and pushes the agenda of the Democratic Party in the United States while squelching the opinions of its rivals. The collusion of Twitter with the Secretary of State of the state of Massachusetts to suppress free-speech rights was exposed in a lawsuit by Shiva Ayyadurai, a former Senate candidate from the state, and the lawsuit has made headway in a federal court. Social media channels have long worked to stifle Ayyadurai’s voice on their platforms.
Ironically, the three people designated by the UN to preach to India are from countries with cultures that have an extremely poor record of human rights and have even indulged in barbaric behaviour. Irene Khan is from Bangladesh where Hindus are oppressed, Clement Nyaletsossi Voule is from Togo, a country known for military coups, and Joseph Cannataci is from Malta, which has imposed Roman Catholicism as its state religion. Voule has also been part of Amnesty International, a group that claims to be independent, but which actually works with the US State Department and acts on behalf of certain missionary interests around the world, and has attacked indigenous religions in his home country of Togo.
The frequency of UN attacks on India has gone up in recent times. It launched a dishonest attack when Article 370 was neutralized, even though that led to everyone in Jammu and Kashmir finally being granted equal rights. It then attacked India once again for granting asylum to members of minority religions who had fled religious persecution in the three Islamic countries of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, and claimed that the use of religious identity by India to frame the law was unacceptable. This was despite the fact that the European Union, United States, and the United Nations routinely use religion, race and national origin as eligibility criteria to grant asylum to refugees. The resentment of the UN in this case seems to have been fuelled by the sole fact that many of those in a state of despair and helplessness who were granted asylum were Hindus.
Yet another attack by international institutions affiliated with the UN began in 2020 when the Indian government granted farmers the right to sell their produce directly to consumers and retail businesses instead of being forced to sell them to cartels that acted as middlemen. For many years, the World Trade Organization has lobbied on behalf of multinational corporations seeking access to the produce of Indian farmers, and in 2014, the then Reserve Bank of India governor and a former economist of the International Monetary Fund, Raghuram Rajan stated, “There is a need to reduce the wedge between what the farmer gets and what is paid by the household by reducing the role, number and monopoly power of middlemen as well as by improving logistics.” The World Bank supported this position in the past, and in 2013, a group headed by Kaushik Basu, the former Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank, recommended to the Indian government that the law governing the Agricultural Produce Market Committees be amended to permit farmers to sell directly to traders as the law had contributed to cartelization and collusion, and had led to inflation in food prices.
Despite such a stance, the international organizations hostile to India and their fellow travellers including Raghuram Rajan and Kaushik Basu sensed an opportunity to create civil strife in India. They decided to make an about turn and started attacking the Indian government for passing the Farm Bill.
The anti-India faction in the UN has now become ambitious and has set its eyes on controlling the Indian economy. The High-Level Panel for International Financial Accountability, Transparency and Integrity for Achieving the 2030 Agenda (FACTI), another arm of the United Nations, has proposed a Global Minimum Corporate Tax. This is being marketed to India as a means to end money laundering and to curb black money. In reality, the goal of such an agreement is to prevent the Indian economy from growing by attracting businesses from around the world. This game was given away by United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in April this year when she echoed the UN’s calls for a global minimum corporate tax in her speech before the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and admitted that the goal was to reduce the likelihood of American companies relocating offshore. Curiously, none of the panellists of FACTI, which wants to dictate economic policies to the Indian government are from India, but belong to 18 other countries including Pakistan, China, US and Norway, four countries that routinely work overtly and covertly to destabilize India.
The behaviour of the officials of the World Health Organization—a sister organization of the UN—in the manner they have dealt with the Covid pandemic too should call into question the true motives of international institutions. Instead of embracing the findings and attempting to validate the work of researchers at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences who found that the drug Ivermectin was effective in the treatment of the pandemic, WHO has acted as though it has a vested interest in the spread of Covid in India and has attempted to block the use of Ivermectin. It has even provided misleading advice to the Indian government against the use of the drug despite the fact that the research by AIIMS is rooted in sound science. WHO’s dishonesty is on public display, as in the past, the National Institute of Health, the Centers for Disease Control in the US, the medical journal Lancet and many others have extolled the drug which has been described as having “minimal side-effects” and “extraordinary human benefit,” and as a “wonder drug” that belongs in the league of penicillin and aspirin as they have “had greatest beneficial impact on the health and wellbeing of Mankind”.
WHO’s erroneous advice seems to have arisen from an apparent conflict of interest as its website reveals that it works with a number of religious organizations such as the Samaritan’s Purse, World Vision, CARE International, and many others, but excludes Hindu groups from becoming its partners. WHO thus facilitates religious conversions by foreign missionary groups in India who distribute drugs and present themselves as the saviours of poor Indians who would have otherwise faced a certain death.
Since the international organizations hold a vision of the world in which the only policies by India that are acceptable are those which grant an unfair advantage to Christians and Muslims, and since they repeatedly attack India and Hindus, they must not be trusted. India must chart its own course and not only ignore such international organizations, but take any suggestion given by them with a huge truckload of salt.
Arvind Kumar can be reached at arvindk@uchicago.edu