The Ford Foundation’s Quest to Fix the World – this New Yorker piece in the January 2016 issue of the magazine by someone named Larissa MacFarquhar caught my eye. It’s beyond doubt that Ford Foundation is a highly controversial organization with an unsavory past in India (and I suspect in many other third-world countries), and I was keen to know what the insufferably long and at-times rambling piece had to say about Ford Foundation and India. To be honest, I suspected at the onset this was a puff piece done to massage the egos of the high-and-mighty at the Ford Foundation, and by the time I had read through it, my suspicions had been confirmed, and worse.There were two bits that caught my attention in particular.

The first: “In April, the government froze the bank accounts of Greenpeace India, and in the same month cancelled the registration of nearly nine thousand N.G.O.s that received money from abroad.”

While true in itself, this sentence failed the basic smell-test of journalistic ethics. Why? Because the sentence presented facts selectively to present a manifestly one-sided version of what actually transpired.

The facts – not in dispute – are such:

In October 2014, the government of India had sent notices to 10,343 NGOs that received foreign funds for not filing their annual returns for three years in a row – 2009-10, 2010-11 and 2011-12. Only 229 replied. [source: India Today report, April 28, 2015, link] Therefore, in April 2015, the licenses of approximately 9000 NGOs were cancelled. Not as a retributive measure – as the article implies – but for not following the law of the land, after following due process.

Hence my conclusion that the writer of the piece failed – either due to incompetence or worse – to follow basic journalistic ethics.

The second item that caught my attention was more serious.

In an attempt to appear objective, the writer tried to include some criticisms of the Ford Foundation’s activities in India. This is what the pertinent sentence is: “responding to government concerns about overpopulation, Ford funded research that led indirectly to a forced-sterilization program in the mid-seventies that unintentionally killed close to two thousand people owing to botched surgeries.”

Now, this line is something that goes beyond mere journalistic incompetence and enters the hallowed grounds of PR whitewashing on behalf of Ford Foundation. Whitewashing of Ford Foundation’s culpability in the mass-murder of millions of fetuses. Of female fetuses, to be precise by making it sound that Ford Foundation was at best guilty of funding the incompetent, nothing more. The truth, however, is far more serious, and paints the Ford Foundation in a much, much darker light.

That is a rather fantastical accusation to make, isn’t it? If yes, it’s only because it’s true.

And yes, the answer is somewhat long.

In the 1960s – over half a century ago, when paranoia over communism was at its peak in the West, it was argued that poverty helped fuel a drive towards communism. The thinking in the West went that over-population was a big contributing factor towards poverty.

the UN, World Bank, Ford Foundation, and other eminent groups teamed up together to come up with strategies. Therefore poor nations with large populations (India, China) were most at risk of being overrun by communism. These nations had to be stopped from over-breeding. Ergo,

This included funding advances in contraception. But the biggest “breakthrough” in their thinking was this: Families in countries like India had large families because they wanted a son, and kept reproducing till they got a son. If a son was what they wanted, why not simply abort the female foetus? That way, the civilized westerners reasoned, the poor would get what they wanted – a son – and the West would get what it wanted – a stop to the rapid rise in the populations of these countries. Problem solved.

US President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 had remarked: “Less than $5 invested in population control is worth a hundred dollars invested in economic growth.” “In 1965, Alaskan Senator Ernest Gruening, aware of the forecasts for trouble in India and cheered by Johnson’s willingness to address the issue, launched a three-year series of hearings on the population crisis.”

Eminent personalities who worried about the “population bomb” included John D. Rockefeller III, who decided to do something about it. A gathering took place in 1952: the “Conference on Population Problems“, to discuss the possibility of exporting population control to “poor growing countries”, and India was at the top of everyone’s mind there.

Rockefeller founded the Population Council, Moore founded Population Crisis Committee. The two bandied with the Ford Foundation, World Bank, UNFPA, USAID, IPPF to sell Asian nations population control. At the same time, even other aid was made contingent on “the adoption of population control targets.“

Thus was born amniocentesis or sex-selective abortions.

At AIIMS (All India Institute of Medical Sciences), the Ford Foundation and others gave money for the research, by determining the sex of the foetus: a female foetus could be aborted. A young doctor who worked at the AIIMS in the 1970s writes about one such experience that left him shaken. He saw a cat carrying off a freshly aborted foetus, blood dripping. Funding from the West had achieved wanton killing of foetuses in India on a massive scale.

By the late 1970s the western advisors had mostly left, and it was only recently that the IPFF and Rockefeller archives were opened up. The “story begins in the mid 1960s” when Sheldon Segal headed to India. Segal had been hired by John D Rockefeller II and he became head of the Population Council’s biomedical division. In India, he became personal advisor to the head of India’s director of family planning operations.