'We can shift the focus from a nation going after its own'

Amnesty International India is locked in a head-on clash with Narendra Modi's government. Aakar Patel, the man at its helm, tells Arpan Rai that he won't go down without a fight

For a man going toe-to-toe with the state in the shrinking battleground of human rights activism in India, Aakar Patel is surprisingly upbeat about dealing with the government agents who raid his office from time to time. “Maybe I should make some money by starting a class teaching people how to handle investigative agencies and their officers,” jokes the chair of the board at Amnesty International India.

Plans for an interview with The Independent at Amnesty’s India office had to be hastily rearranged because “there’s not much space to sit amid [case] files”. Patel, a former journalist turned author and activist who operates out of the southern city of Bengaluru, isn’t exaggerating. He and Amnesty are currently dealing with at least 11 separate defamation and criminal cases, translating into the mountains of paperwork that now dominate any functional space within the organisation’s premises that might have been used for day-to-day operations.

Amnesty’s persistent criticism of the government’s rights record since Narendra Modi came to power in 2014 has come at a high cost for the NGO – one of many in India to have had its operations curtailed by the authorities. In August 2020, its work came to a grinding halt when the government froze its bank accounts and raided this office in Bengaluru.

That was only one of a flurry of raids carried out by various authorities, with the government’s financial crimes agency eventually bringing charges of money laundering against the organisation. They accused Amnesty of restructuring its India operations in order to continue receiving foreign funding, after its permission to do so was revoked by the government.