Bengaluru       Picking up a copy of the Times of India, while waiting for ACORN’s Indian organizing directors for another session of our annual meetings, there were several articles on how Elon Musk and his Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) has supposedly uncovered a grant for $21 million from a division of the United States Agency for International Development to increase voter turnout in India’s recent election.  On the US side, this was just another of the throw-it-up-against-the-wall efforts of the Musketeers to justify their mayhem of freezes, firings, and fractures of the US government.  On the India side, it was another opportunity for the ruling BJP, far right, communalist governing party to rant about its litany of grievances and long hate of US-AID.  Somewhat typically, this is simply coup counting on both sides of the world, while the facts about this tempest in a teapot are wholly different.

The Washington Post actually tried, and succeeded as best they could with what little of real data from DOGE they had to work with, to prove this was all another Musk-mess of sloppy balderdash.  As they report,

The alleged $21 million to be spent in India was mentioned as part of a larger $486 million payment to the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening (CEPPS) — a USAID-funded consortium of nonprofits “dedicated to advancing and supporting democratic practices and institutions” in more than 140 countries since 1995, according to an archived version of its website, taken down soon after Trump took office. There is no record of a CEPPS program matching DOGE’s description in India, according to people familiar with the organization’s work. CEPPS did have a $21 million USAID contract — not for India, but for neighboring Bangladesh.

To their credit, the Times of India has also tried to turn back the tide of BJP and Indian government and politicians’ drumbeating on this falsehood by raising the likelihood that the money had actually gone to Bangladesh, not India at all, but as the Post inferred, the damage was likely done.

The Narendra Modi government, like the new Trump government, has been at war with their government employees over issues of loyalty to their extreme programs, so this was fuel for the fire.  That this issue is all about simply taking another whack at longstanding unproven grievances and score settling, became clearer as the Post looked at other BJP claims;

…the BJP’s head of information and technology, accused India’s previous opposition-led government of “handing over the entire Election Commission of India to foreign operators.” But that, too, was misleading. IFES was contracted by India’s Election Commission to develop a curriculum on election management, according to a person familiar with the terms of the agreement. “It was really boring work,” the person said. “And ultimately the Election Commission of India approved every single line of the curriculum IFES designed.” The IFES course material has been used by India not for its own elections, but to train electoral officials from around the world. On its website, the Election Commission boasts of having trained 69,362 election officials from 109 countries. “ECI has always championed the need for international cooperation among democracies,” the commission’s website reads.  A Post review of public documents shows the 2012 agreement with IFES was updated as recently as August 2020 — at the behest of Indian officials chosen by Modi’s administration.  S.Y. Quraishi, who initiated the collaboration with IFES and set up the training institute as India’s chief election commissioner between 2010 and 2012, said in a statement that the accusations circulating in India were “completely false and malicious.”

The Post is being too prim and proper, or maybe just trying not to have the story pulled by its owner, Amazon mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos, as has become so frequent recently.  Calling this misleading is putting lipstick on a pig.  These are all lies, pure and simple:  another favor that one wannabe autocratic government in the US is providing for an already autocratic regime in India.