Amnesty shuts India operations

AMNESTY International, a global human rights agency, announced last Tuesday that it was shutting down its operations in India.

On its webpage, Amnesty said this was due to the government freezing all of its funds through an order last month.

In a statement, the advocacy group accused India’s government of “an incessant witch-hunt” against human rights organisations that have revealed wrongdoing by Indian authorities in recent years.

“For a movement that has done nothing but raise its voices against injustice, this latest attack is akin to freezing dissent,” Avinash Kumar, executive director of Amnesty International India, said in the statement.

Amnesty’s latest investigations in India were claimed to have focused on alleged human rights abuses in India’s only Muslim-majority region, Kashmir, as well as on alleged misconduct by Indian police in last February’s Delhi riots that killed dozens of mostly Muslim civilians.

Later, the Indian government also issued a statement calling Amnesty’s claims “unfortunate, exaggerated and far from the truth”.

The statement accused Amnesty of illegally routing money to India through its UK branch for several years.

“All the glossy statements about humanitarian work and speaking truth to power are nothing but a ploy to divert attention from their activities which were in clear contravention of laid down Indian laws,” the government had said.

An article by The Hindu reported that Amnesty’s closure had evoked concern from its headquarters in the UK, the EU and the US.

Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister, and his Bharatiya Janata Party government, claimed Amnesty was in violation of Indian law.

That is according to foreign policy.com, that reported that “there was more than ample evidence that the government was irritated by Amnesty’s unfavourable reports on recent riots in New Delhi, India’s human rights record in Jammu and Kashmir, and the passage of recent legislation that could adversely affect Muslims”.

According to reports, this was not the first time that Indian authorities have taken action against Amnesty.

It was reported that in 2016, they charged the group with sedition for holding an event in the southern city of Bengaluru, related to Kashmir.

While in 2018, Indian authorities raided the Amnesty Delhi office and froze its bank accounts, accusing the group of violating rules on foreign funding, including as far back as 2009, before Modi’s Hindu nationalist party came into power.

At that time, Amnesty denied any wrongdoing.

It had temporarily shut its India operations several times before but has always reopened.

The closure of Amnesty has resulted in it laying off about 150 people.