Don’t take them seriously! Anti-India bias runs deep in human rights groups in West

Human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, their smaller cousins, and the foundations who support them consider themselves arbiters of democracy and humanitarian law. They deserve no such respect. Too often, these groups betray their founding principles with a willingness to prioritise subjective political stances above objective standards and poor methodology. After the exposure of errors, if not illegality, too often analysts deflect criticism and excuse fraud rather than correct mistakes.

Consider the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). In 2019, the official non-governmental organisation of the Society of Friends [Quakers] and the winners of the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize urged the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to not award its Global Goalkeeper Award to Prime Minister Narendra Modi because of “his government’s well-documented human rights abuses”. Fair enough, but then why did the AFSC never apologise for its full-throated endorsement of the Khmer Rouge, the murderous Cambodian regime responsible for the murder of more than one million civilians? Instead, the group dismissed “bloodbath stories” as meant to punish the group for exposing an alternate development model rejecting “exploitation by multinational corporations seeking raw materials, markets for surplus, and cheap labor.” Perhaps had the AFSC considered why it was so wrong in Cambodia, it would not have replicated its mistake by embracing North Korea and Hamas.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are no better. A decade ago, both groups collaborated with AlKarama, a self-described human rights advocacy group. When it emerged an Al Qaeda financier founded Alkarama to weaponise false human rights accusations against Muslim Brotherhood opponents, Human Rights Watch doubled down on its reports rather than acknowledge its own poor vetting led to falsehood, while Amnesty International researcher Mansoureh Mills doubled down while casting false accusations at critics.

Former Executive Director Ken Roth showed how arbitrary the group’s methodology was when, angered by Egypt’s refusal to issue him a visa, he arbitrarily increased the number of alleged victims in a report critical of the Sisi regime.

The group’s bias against Israel was so great that, in 2009, its founder Robert Bernstein took to the pages of the New York Times to lament how the organisation he had run for 20 years had gone so far off the rails. Its bias against Rwanda was so great that, in 2017, the group reported that the Rwandan government had executed several petty criminals. When Rwanda subsequently showed that those individuals were not only alive and well but in many cases walking free, Human Rights Watch refused to explain how such a mistake could have passed its vetting process.

While political ideology may have guided the group into a moral abyss, so too did greed. In 2009, Sarah Leah Whitson, director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division, held a fundraiser in Saudi Arabia in which she reportedly suggested a quid pro quo in which Human Rights Watch would go easy on Saudi abuses if Saudi businessmen donated to Human Rights Watch coffers.

Pay-to-play and fraud increasingly undermine the sanctity and reputation of human rights groups. The two decade-long US effort to rebuild Afghanistan transformed three classes of people to become millionaires many times over: Afghan politicians raked in hundreds of millions of dollars through corruption schemes. Contractors likewise profited from projects that seldom came to fruition or lasted. Ordinary Afghans told me the best way to make millions for them was to form a non-governmental organisation to speak the language of humanitarian law while receiving grants from naïve American and European funders.

Last month, the US Congress held a hearing to examine Liberia’s decision to stand-up a War and Economic Crimes Court to try those who committed abuses or sought to profit from the two Liberian civil wars that ended in 2003. At issue was not the court itself, but rather some of the fraud surrounding those like the Swiss-based Civitas Maxima and its local Liberian partner who have sought to profit from prosecuting Liberian war crimes. Courts have dismissed cases against supposed war criminals and blood diamond merchants across Europe after evidence emerged that Civitas Maxima coached witnesses to testify falsely. The scheme was less individual shakedown and more an effort to take advantage of the human rights industry. An irony of human rights research is criticism comes easier in open societies like Israel, Liberia, Morocco, and India than in closed societies like Syria, Guinea, Algeria, or Pakistan. By achieving a conviction, Civitas Maxima and its partners could apply for lucrative grants from groups like the California-based Center for Justice and Accountability or various foundations.

Herein the self-dealing gets worse. Prior to her appointment to be the US ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, Beth Van Schaack was acting executive director at the same Center for Justice and Accountability that funded the Liberia fraud. Rather than acknowledge her own wrongdoing, alongside Human Rights Watch she has circled the wagons to endorse the same groups now at the center of the witness-tampering scandal. As the United States lectures India on human rights and supposed transnational repression against designated Sikh terrorists, Washington does not acknowledge that Congress seeks an inspector general investigation of one of its prime point people for justice and human rights.

Many of these factors come into play in the human rights industry’s obsessive criticism of India. Human rights groups’ claims that there is systematic persecution of religious minorities in India run contrary to comprehensive surveys by professional outfits like Pew found religious minorities overwhelmingly enjoy religious freedom and face little discrimination. “Nine out of 10… say they feel ‘very free’ to practice their faith, and many borrow from one another’s beliefs in ways that Westerners might find baffling. More than 3 in 4 Indian Muslims subscribe to the Hindu concept of karma, for example. A third of India’s Christians believe in the purifying properties of the Ganges River, and nearly 1 in 5 Jains and Sikhs celebrate Christmas,” Pew found.

Many groups cherry pick to paint India’s democracy in a poor light. They fail to mention religious accommodations and laws that minorities enjoy such as separate personal law, control of their own places of worship with subsidies from the government and an entire minority affairs ministry to advocate for and invest in minority life and culture. What political activists acting under the cloak of human rights advocacy do not cherry pick, they often misinterpret.

Consider, for example, condemnation of India’s Citizenship Amendment Act, which gave fast track naturalisation for Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Christians who fled to India from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan before 2015. Human rights activists cited the law as discriminatory against Muslims, but they ignore its goal was to offer refuge to minorities in neighbouring states. Their logic was bizarre. If the United States wanted to protect Uyghur Muslims from an unprecedented Chinese onslaught, it would not privilege Han Chinese. Nor was the Citizenship Amendment Act much different from the Lautenberg-Specter Amendment that catered to the needs of Soviet Jews experiencing government persecution and discrimination and facilitated family reunification for those who escaped Soviet tyranny.

Human rights groups likewise misinterpreted the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir. Not only did the abrogation enable Kashmiris to enjoy better equality under the law, but also the move broke the power of feudal lords and corrupt middlemen who interfered with local farmers’ ability to get crops to market.

The subjectivity and hypocrisy of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the US State Department could be severe. While Indian Kashmir now thrives, Pakistan continues to administer the portion of Kashmir it occupies as a police state. Pakistan’s sale of Gilgit’s resources and displacement of its population is a continuing scandal too often met with silence. Indeed, while minorities thrive in India, they face systematic persecution in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch might condemn rapes and murders when they make international headlines, but their general rule is to pay little attention to both country’s explicitly discriminatory laws. The latest Human Rights Watch report on Pakistan, for example, did not mention a single human rights violation against its Hindu minority, despite hundreds of kidnappings, forced conversions and forced marriages of Hindu girls every year.

Human rights groups preach but decades of prioritising politics over objectivity and ideology over methodology have rendered their reports meaningless. Obsessive focus on India reflects not the Indian government’s abuse of humanitarian law, but rather the accusers’ Hinduphobia, distaste for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s electoral success, and India’s own transparency and access compared to its neighbours. In addition, bashing India brings in big bucks and allows resident researchers either to live locally like colonial officers or to climb the career ladder like Van Schaack. Either way, until human rights groups hold themselves to professional standards and those like Van Schaack with conflicts of interest recuse themselves or resign, India would be right to dismiss any report outright as political polemic rather than sincere appraisal.

Michael Rubin is director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.