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.”

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.

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, the UN, World Bank, Ford Foundation, and other eminent groups teamed up together to come up with strategies.

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.

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.

Mrs. Indira Gandhi was awarded the United Nations Population Award – the first recipient of this award, in 1983.

While any concrete link between western foundations and sex-selective abortions in India has been hard to prove, Dr. Puneet Bedi speculates it was “mainly the Ford Foundation.” He was a medical student in 1978, when on a round at Delhi’s Lok Nayak Jayaprakash Narayan Hospital, just outside the labor room, “a cat bounded past him with a bloody blob dangling from its mouth.”

“In 1975 AIIMS, the country’s most prestigious medical school, unveiled India’s first amniocentesis tests at its govt teaching hospital.” Other hospitals quickly started offering the test. Doctors not only readily identfied the sex of the foetus, but also offered to abort if it was a female foetus. Several AIIMS doctors published papers “explaining the project as an experimental trial with potential to be introduced on a larger scale.”

Therefore, these foundations and their money comes with at a heavy, heavy cost. It may well be a perfect example of a Faustian bargain.

But there is an even deeper story here. One whose facts run contrary to the charge of misogyny and patriarchy hurled at Indians, and especially Hindus, in arguing that a bias against the female child has been an invariant of Hindu India for millennia.

Here again, facts speak otherwise, and paint yet another grim picture of yet another genocide that western intervention wreaked. This time, you have to go back a hundred or more years.

When the British conducted the first census in the Indian colony (in the last quarter of the nineteenth century), they found a skewed gender ratio, even then.They looked to Hindu texts to explain this bias against the girl child but actually found that Hindu texts condemned the killing of foetuses, without exception. So much so that even John William Kaye, the East India Company historian, had to concede in his “curmudgeonly way”: “It is almost the one exceptional case of a barbarous custom that has not the sanction expressed or implied, by precept or example, of the monstrous faith [Hinduism] which these people profess.”

So what was behind the practice of female infanticide? After all, if it had been a “custom”, no group could have survived for millennia practicing this “custom.”

A clue lay in the fact that the practice was more widespread among land owning groups. Lower castes had simply “copied” the practice. “As time went on, the idea that some castes and tribes had always killed girls evolved into doctrine.”

When the British took control over the country, they centralized land administration and introduced stricter property rights than what the Mughals had enforced. European “medieval feudalism” was transported to India.”Women had once held property rights,but now they were excluded from owning land.”

The three chief takeaways from this are:

Chief reference: “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men”, by Mara Hvistendahl  [link]