Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was honored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation at a midtown reception Tuesday night, but outside, a crowd of demonstrators held signs and Modi effigies and called the award a travesty.
“For Bill Gates and Melinda Gates to honor this man at this moment is unacceptable,” said Fawzia Syed, a member of Justice for All and one of about two dozen protesters. “And the world should be disgusted.”
The award, in recognition of a massive sanitation initiative launched by the prime minister that has sought to transform the lives of hundreds of millions of rural Indians, has been the subject of heated debate, primarily stemming from ongoing human rights violations in Kashmir.
In early August, the Indian government initiated a complete communications blackout in Kashmir. Thousands of people were arrested, including elected leaders, and the Muslim-majority region has been under military lockdown for close to two months. Many people simply cannot reach their family members in Kashmir.
Listen to reporter Arun Venugopal's story for WNYC:
Celebrities including Riz Ahmed and Jameela Jamil pulled out of the Gates event, and three Nobel Peace Laureates, including Shirin Ebadi, co-authored a letter to the foundation, asking it to rescind the honor, known as the Global Goalkeeper award.
“India has descended into dangerous and deadly chaos that has consistently undermined human rights,” read the letter.
One staffer at the Gates Foundation, Sabah Hamid, who is herself Kashmiri, resigned in protest.
“Eight million of my people have been under an undeclared curfew for 50 days now, with minimal access even to medical care, and there is a humanitarian crisis under way in the valley,” she said in an interview with TRT World.
Indian Prime Minister Modi accepts his award from the Gates Foundation.
But for Modi, who was brought on stage by Bill Gates himself, the award was an opportunity to play up the successes of his administration abroad, just days after speaking to a crowd of 50,000 supporters in Houston. He credited Mahatma Gandhi as the inspiration for the sanitation program, Swachh Bharat, which aimed to construct millions of latrines and end of what’s known as open defecation.
“Gandhiji used to say that an ideal village is that which is completely clean,” he said during his remarks. “And today we are looking at making not just an ideal village but an entire country that is ideal.”
According to Modi and Indian government claims, Swachh Bharat has been a resounding success, completely ending the problem of open defecation in just five years.
Many independent observers, however, say that while the campaign has made marked improvements in rural sanitation, the government’s numbers are wildly inflated.
Aashish Gupta, a doctoral student in geography and demography at the University of Pennsylvania, was part of a team that exhaustively analyzed the Swachh Bharat campaign, conducting nearly 10,000 interviews across four states in North India.
“In our survey we conducted between August-December 2018, open defecation was 44% in these states,” he wrote in an email.
Additionally, he said 12 percent of those surveyed said someone in their household had experienced some form of coercion at the hands of government officials, and that 56 percent of villagers were aware of coercion in their village. He said villagers “were routinely threatened that they would lose legal entitlements such as food rations or wages in public works if they did not build a toilet.”
This particularly affected Dalits, formerly known as the untouchable caste, as well as members of indigenous communities, or Adivasis.
He said these revelations held an important lesson for the Gates Foundation and other Western organizations committed to improving lives around the world.
“The international development community must pay careful attention to what actually went on in India’s sanitation program, and it should not ignore that many households were coerced in the achievement of these goals.”
Arun Venugopal is a reporter who focuses on issues of race and immigration at WNYC. You can follow him on Twitter at @arunNYC.
