Amidst the ongoing Lok Sabha elections, Yamini Aiyar wrote a propaganda piece in the journal ‘Nature’ decrying the scientific temperament and academic freedom in India. Yamini is the daughter of controversial Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar.
The vicious piece was published on Tuesday (30th April) and was titled ‘Why doing science is difficult in India today.’
The article relied on rankings published by the Sweden-based institute, Varieties of Democracy (V- Dem), which put India in the bottom 20% of the list in academic freedom among 179 countries.
For those unaware of V-Dem, it is funded by the likes of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF) and has been involved in anti-India propaganda for several years. OpIndia has previously reported that Soros has been eyeing a colour revolution in India.
“India’s academic freedom has been in steady decline for a decade. This is well documented…Historically, academic freedoms were certainly not perfect in India. Yet even a cursory glance at the evidence reveals that the scale of restrictions and the misuse of laws to curb academic freedom has increased,” Yamini Aiyar claimed in her article.
She was shrewd enough to mention ‘decade’ (2014-2024) in her propaganda piece to suggest that the Modi government has been the reason for supposedly curbing academic freedom in India and that the country was the land of scientific temperament before 2014.
Yamini Aiyar whines about FCRA licence suspension
It must be mentioned that Yamini Aiyar was the former President of a New Delhi-based ‘think tank’ named Centre for Policy Research (CPR). In March this year, the Indian government suspended the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA) licence of CPR for violating foreign funding norms.
The Centre for Policy Research has been the subject of income tax raids in September 2022. The tax exemption status of Aiyar’s think tank was also revoked in July last year. The daughter of Mani Shankar Aiyar thus made it a point to whine inconsolably about the government’s crackdown on CPR.
“Given that public funds have many competing priorities, much of our research relies on international philanthropic funding. That is becoming increasingly difficult to come by, owing to a tightening of the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA), which controls licences to access foreign funding,” she claimed in her article in Nature journal.
Yamini Aiyar then lamented about the strengthening of the FCRA Act in 2020, which was also upheld by India’s apex court, and the suspension of licences of ‘civil society organisations’ required for obtaining foreign funds.
“For instance, after amendments to this law in 2020, recipients of foreign funding cannot give subgrants to other organizations, making collaborative research impossible. And since 2014, nearly 17,000 civil-society organizations have lost their FCRA licences altogether. For those that still have a licence, the renewal process is onerous. Many organizations receive temporary extensions of three to six months, rather than the full period of five years allowed under law,” she wrote.
Daughter of Mani Shankar Aiyar floats conspiracy theory
Aiyar insinuated that the lack of updated data on the decennial census, household expenditure survey, poverty reduction etc are somehow part of the Modi government’s strategy to prevent objective analysis of its economic policies.
She also suggested that the Indian government somehow had an invisible hand in the recall of a critical paper on ‘declining toilet usage in rural India’ albeit without evidence.
“In my view, it has now become increasingly common for technocrats in government to seek to discredit researchers and suppress research. In late 2023, for instance, the World Bank removed from its website an important study that highlighted reversals of progress recorded under a flagship sanitation programme. The bank cited procedural issues, but was presumably under government pressure,” Yamini Aiyar brazened out without furnishing any proof.
Towards the end of her propaganda piece, the daughter of Mani Shankar Aiyar attempted to portray a doomsday image of procedural regulations in India and pleaded for an alliance of sorts to uphold ‘scientific freedom’
“To reverse these trends, researchers must make their voices heard and be willing to defend the principle and value of academic freedom in the public domain. Research bodies should engage more effectively with philanthropists in India and find ways to preserve the space for civil discourse. An alliance with broader civil society is also required to push back against draconian regulations that undermine scientific freedoms,” Yamini Aiyar concluded her rant.
Recently, the controversial United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) also raked up the case of CPR in its 2024 annual report to cast aspersions on India’s democracy.