Did Oxfam India And Some NGOs Act On Behalf Of Foreign Powers? — Here's What CBI's FIR Says

“This exposed the Oxfam India as a probable instrument of foreign policy of foreign organisations/entities which have funded the Oxfam India liberally over the years,” states the FIR. 

This has opened up serious questions on what the international NGO was doing with its foreign funding.

On Thursday, the Indian Express published a report about the Income Tax department’s findings in probes into various non-governmental organisations—Oxfam, Centre for Policy Research, Environics Trust, Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment and Care India Solution for Sustainable Development.

The IT Department has claimed that these NGOs were using foreign funds and collaborated with foreign entities to stall projects by the Adani Group. These NGOs funded each other for activities which violated the law, it has alleged.

These findings in India are an echo of a speech given in Munich on Feb. 17, 2023. Billionaire hedge fund investor and philanthropist George Soros made his stand clear.

“Modi and business tycoon Adani are close allies. Their fate is intertwined. Adani Enterprises tried to raise funds in the stock market but failed. Adani is accused of stock manipulation and his stock collapsed like a house of cards,” Soros had said at the Munich Security Conference. 

“Modi is silent on the subject, but he will have to answer questions from foreign investors and in Parliament. This has significantly weakened Modi’s stranglehold on India’s federal government and opened the door to push much needed institutional reforms. I may be naive, but I expect a democratic revival in India,” he said.

What Soros meant by "democratic revival" was supposedly a regime change—but that did not happen.

How does Soros fit into the scheme of things as far as NGOs and their activities are concerned? The answer lies in the CBI FIR and the findings by the Income Tax Department.

Soros-related entities directly and indirectly funded large and small NGOs like Oxfam India, who then misused these funds to target the Indian government. Here’s what the FIR says about Oxfam’s activities.

1. Routing funds through other means despite FCRA registration being cancelled:

• As per Income Tax Department's survey of Oxfam India, its income is as below.

• The FIR takes a serious view of this and states, “Oxfam India and its employees appears (sic) to be supporting agitational activities." 

• Centre for Policy Research received Rs 12 lakh towards “short term training”, of which Rs 5 lakh was for CPR to use in any way they pleased. Foreign funding was, in effect, being given as commission, to circumvent the Act, it said.

• A large number of NGOs also received sub-grants from the FCRA amount. A total of Rs 2.2 crore was paid out to various NGOs by Oxfam India after September 2020, when the FCRA Act was amended to make such sub-grants illegal, according to the FIR.

• The FIR said Oxfam India had funded Environics Trust to “mobilise communities" with the help of local unions, against the coal industries. A portion of the agreement between the two NGOs is reproduced in the FIR.

2. Creation of a new structure to continue funding NGOs, while bypassing FCRA laws:

• After Oxfam India’s FCRA registration was cancelled, the NGO drew up a new structure that would continue to help it carry out its unstated objectives. The idea was that Oxfam India would co-ordinate with foreign funders (affiliates) and get them to fund handpicked affiliate NGOs directly through the FCRA route. One such supposed example noted in their email exchanges is the NGO Samvad.

• Oxfam India would also set up For-Profit Companies which would completely oversee the expenditure and the project work of these affiliate NGOs, the FIR stated.

• Oxfam India would have an “arms-length” approach to both the FPC and the affiliate NGOs, while in reality driving the whole agenda from behind the scenes, it said.

• Affiliate NGOs such as Samvad were chosen for funding on the condition that they would allow Oxfam India “complete freedom to plan the program and staffing in manner they want", the FIR said.

 Below is an email excerpt which is part of the CBI FIR. 

The diagram below is replicated from the CBI FIR. It outlines the roles and responsibilities of each part of the new structure. XXX indicates Oxfam India. 

Here is an email excerpt that shows the possible names for the FPCs that were to be created by Oxfam India. 

3. Plans to pressurise the Indian government through foreign governments and foreign institutions:

• Oxfam India was planning to use its influence with the World Bank, IMF, European Union, US State Department, Asian Development Bank and a clutch of European governments to put pressure on the Indian government to renew its FCRA registration, the CBI FIR states.

• Oxfam India's Amitabh Behar also approached the Irish embassy in an effort to get the Ireland government to lean on India to renew FCRA. An email excerpt, allegedly, indicative of this, has been included in the FIR.

4. Suspicious donations from huge number of foreign individuals: 

• Strangely, a large number of donations have come into Oxfam’s FCRA account from individuals abroad. Even stranger is that the amounts round off perfectly when converted into Indian rupees. And a large number of individuals have donated the exact same amount.

Below is a sample of the individual donations from abroad. 

• The amount of money donated by foreign individuals via the FCRA route is suspiciously high.

• A British citizen by the name of Banwari Lal had gifted Oxfam India immovable property in Haryana in 2020. Oxfam India sold it for Rs 4 crore, but showed the value of the land as Rs 2.46 crore only. This has raised suspicions about evasion of stamp duty, the FIR said.

Amitabh Behar was the chief executive officer of Oxfam India and was a former executive director of the National Foundation for India. Behar is a mentee of Salil Shetty who was, until recently, vice president – global operations in Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

Organisations led by Behar have been the recipients of major funding from Soros’ Open Society Foundations, as well as other foreign NGOs that are funded by the OSF. Behar is said to have gone abroad shortly after the CBI raided the NGO.

Notably, NGOs are explicitly forbidden from sub-funding other NGOs. They must use the donations they receive only for the stated purpose that they have been formed.

 But Oxfam has sub-funded a host of other NGOs. Some of them include:

• Centre for Equity Studies led by Harsh Mander, a former member of Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council, who was also recently in the running for a Nobel. This organisation has received Rs 1.2 crore from Oxfam. 

• Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment which was founded by advocate Ritwick Dutta. Dutta was legal counsel for Fathima Babu, one of the leaders of the anti-Sterlite protests in Thoothukudi in 2018. 

• Association for Rural and Urban Needy in Telangana, which is run by Bezwada Wilson. Partners of Oxfam in ARUN include the Fund For Global Human Rights, a Washington DC based organisation which connects activists across the world to funding.

• Swadhikar or National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, founded in 1998 and now led by Paul Divakar Namala. 

• Oxfam India also granted Rs 1.4 crore to the Centre for Social Equity and Inclusion between 2016-17 and 2020-21, as shown in their FCRA filings with the Indian government. 

Oxfam India itself has, as its donors, the Malala Fund, which is a well-known fund that donates to promote education for girls and is funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundation. 

Centre for Policy Research is another NGO named in the Indian Express report as having allegedly carried out agitations and other activities against the Adani Group.

The think tank's direct foreign funding in 2019-20 was Rs 24.5 crore. Apart from this, it had unspent FCRA funds to the tune of Rs 43.7 crore. 

CPR had received Rs 11.63 crore from the Ford Foundation during 2013-2019 to study ‘urban research network.’ 

By the financial year ended March 2021, CPR had a balance amount of Rs 2.3 crore, given in grants by the Ford Foundation. It also had Rs 1.6 crore balance from grants given by the Omidyar Network. And from Washington DC-based Namati, CPR had a balance of Rs 8.2 lakh. 

In 2022, as per FCRA data available on the site, Namati had provided funding of Rs 2 crore. 

The same year, the Ford Foundation had provided funding to the tune of Rs 52 lakh. 

The World Resources Institute had provided funding to the tune of Rs 89 lakh in 2022. 

World Resources Institute has listed as a major donor, Soros’ Open Society. While the exact funding is not provided, Soros’ OSF appears to have provided more than $750,000 in funding to WRI between 2020 and 2022. 

Let us take a look at Namati as well. Namati is directly funded by George Soros’ OSF and Luminate, the Ford Foundation, as well as by the US State Department. 

In fact, George Soros is on the advisory board of Namati, as per its website. 

The CPR is headed by Chairperson Meenakshi Gopinath and President and Chief Executive Yamini Aiyar. Earlier, it was headed by journalist Pratap Bhanu Mehta.

LIFE or Legal Initiative For Forest And Environment was founded in 2005 by two lawyers—Ritwick Dutta and Rahul Choudhary. LIFE’s aim is to promote environmental democracy through means of law. It does not litigate by itself, but it assists and supports groups which wish to do so.

Dutta has been involved in a number of high profile cases—he represented the petitioner who filed a case at the National Green Tribunal against conducting the World Cultural Festival on the banks of the Yamuna river in 2016, by the Art of Living. As mentioned earlier, he was also legal counsel for one of the lead protesters in the anti-Sterlite protests that rocked Tamil Nadu in 2018.

Dutta has also argued cases against dams in Uttarakhand and North Eastern India, Lafarge project in Himachal Pradesh, Vedanta bauxite mining in Niyamgiri, Jindal Steel in Chhattisgarh, illegal sand mining in Uttar Pradesh, moving lions from Gujarat to Madhya Pradesh and others.

FCRA details of foreign funds inflow into LIFE are shown in the table below.

Founded by the late Sreedhar Ramamurthi, a retired official of Oil and Natural Gas Corp. and the central government’s Atomic Minerals Directorate, this NGO is alleged to have collaborated with the Mineral Inheritors Right Association “for protesting against Jindal Steel Work Protest in Odisha and Adani Coal Projects in Odisha,” as per the IT Department.

Adani Watch, a group that campaigns against Adani Group’s activities wrote a rousing eulogy for Ramamurthi.

The CBI FIR sheds light on certain foreign funding activities of these NGOs. The continuing investigation and processes therewith shall reveal motivations behind these NGOs' and their supposed funders' actions.

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