Intellectual infiltration is inevitably ideologically influential. For decades, the luxurious Left was right in India, where junkets and jams went together in the marketing sandwich of power and pelf. Last week, the Modi government pulled the rug from under the Centre for Policy Research’s funding. Leftist liberal think tanks (TTs), with shallow thinking and deep pockets, comprise the Opinion Market Gang which was lording it over academia and sections of the media with socialist thinking and a business class conscience ever since Indira Gandhi hijacked India’s thought stream to please her Soviet masters.
NGOs are not just fattened calves but also holy cows. Under the umbrella of deals, delusions and divisions, they form a privileged club of clandestine persuaders, masterly movers and suspicious shakers. Rulers may make or break laws, but TTs direct governance through research papers thick with academic jargon. In the ideological race between political teams, TTs are the back-seat drivers.
Last week, the 50-year-old Centre for Policy Research (CPR) was accused by the BJP government of misusing the statutory permissions to receive funds from India and abroad, and permanently cancelled the official permission. Late last year, IT officials had visited the NGO’s premises for a survey and collected many documents of interest. The CPR's current budget of Rs 30 crore comes from Indian and global institutions, and governments. CPR President and Chief Executive Yamini Aiyar protested, "The basis of this decision is incomprehensible and disproportionate, and some of the reasons given challenge the very basis of the functioning of a research institution.” The CPR has already challenged the orders in the courts.
CPR’s fund-raising capacities have raised questions on the operations of its numerous avatars. It was set up in 1973 when Indira Gandhi was the prime minister and allotted land in the most exclusive and strategically located diplomatic habitat of Chanakya Puri. CPR was a permanent parking lot for semi-retired but well-connected civil servants, academics, former defence officials and diplomats. Its mandate was to provide the government with ideas and remedies to handle knotty policy patterns. Over the years, it expanded its academic and geographical space to cover 30-odd disciplines. Subjects listed on its website include agriculture, sanitation, land rights, international and strategic relations, federalism, education, environmental laws, governance, accountability and public finance and, of course, politics. For the past 50 years, it mostly hired people connected with Left-leaning bigwigs. According to its critics, Jawaharlal Nehru is its ideological and sociological icon.
It is still Washington DC’s most trusted brown nose. A causal dekko of the names of visiting scholars and research subjects during the past decade reveals CPR’s fault-finding mission to discredit the current dispensation and influence gullible young researchers. No wonder that its current Chairperson Meenakshi Gopinath, in her speech on the TT's 47th anniversary, boasted that it is “a deeply liberal institution in the marketplace of ideas—CPR is a platform, not merely an organisation”. After the government’s action, its President Yamini Aiyar revealed the TT’s establishment connect: "CPR is a 50-year-old institution that has a proud legacy of deep contributions to India’s policy-making ecosystem, and over the past five decades has been home to many distinguished faculty, researchers and members of the board.”
India's illiberal exoskeleton is being slowly picked apart. Perhaps, CPR’s addiction to influence the “policy-making ecosystem” irked the government. Most of its board members, including the chairperson and the president, are known to be anti-Sangh Parivar. CPR tried to change its ideological roadmap after Atal Bihari Vajpayee formed the government in 1998. It brought on board retired officials who were both liberals and close to the PMO and Vajpayee’s Principal Secretary Brajesh Mishra. Once the Vajpayee government was shown the door, CPR reverted to its original tendencies. Since then, a large number of visiting faculty members and scholars have been writing critical articles against the Modi government. Now the government has fingered CPR for financing political agitations against its policy initiatives.
Significantly, the TT's website hides details about its past management, which if revealed, could expose an anti-nationalist nature. Its major funders are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the government of Andhra Pradesh, Hewlett Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, National Mission for Clean Ganga, Piramal Swasthya Management and Research Institute, Rohini Nilekani and the US department of state. Most of these outfits hate Modi.
To avoid extinction, the TT species must think Bharat and behave like Bharatiyas. Though the BJP government has the organisation in its sights, senior babus and some Union ministries have been participating in its activities. For example, Suman Bery, before joining the NITI Aayog, took an active part in the CPR Dialogues. The jal shakti ministry has opened its coffers to the TT. But the saffron establishment feels that CPR abhors giving space to nationalist scholars and bestows favours on individuals considered close to powerful people in Modi’s government. The PMO and the home ministry couldn’t be hoodwinked. They have been scrutinising CPR's research papers, foreign visits by scholars and the affiliations of foreign academics invited to address its Indian audience.
CPR isn’t the only TT which has caught the government’s attention. Most of the 500-odd TTs functioning in India are packed with individuals who got stomach ache after trying to digest the new directorate's sociological victuals. The New Delhi-based India International Centre and its variations are also controlled by old Nehruvian loyalists for whom Marx and Lenin are dogma. These institutions are controlled by the Leftist elite with foreign degrees and powerful pedigrees. Entry and invitations to join them are selective and secretive. Now they rue the demolition of their intellectual mentorship which used to shape the national narrative. They had captured the system and defied the legal framework with immunity and impunity. India was their notional office. Global lobbying was their karmabhoomi.
CPR’s fate is a wakeup call for all the glamorous TTs, including the upstarts who entered the scene after 2014. With its bold action, the government has decided CPR will be denied cardiopulmonary resuscitation, the other CPR, as it drowns in self pity. To survive, TTs should learn the motto ‘TBTA’—Think Before They Act. Or else, the government is sure to read them the Riot Act.