AA Edit | Row over USAID funds to India will never end

Thrice in three days US President Donald Trump questioned the USAID’s alleged $21 million fund for raising the voter turnout in India, which his administration and his adviser Elon Musk said had been cancelled last week.

Never short of drama, the Indian political scene is going through a whole new episode of contrasted finger pointing with the Government of India, which sees a very deeply troubling pattern of external interference in the world’s biggest poll process, and the Congress, which was bound to become a suspect party in such funding, crying themselves hoarse.

Unless the government goes deep into this matter and establishes whether such a fund was, in fact, given to Indian entities and for how long, nothing but conspiracy theories can keep springing out of it. No one is the wiser thus far about who got these funds, if indeed some of the suggested $21 million did trickle through to India

An investigative newspaper report that suggested the said $21 million was for Bangladesh rather than India has been flagged by the Congress to defend itself of charges that somehow its friends and voters were the beneficiaries while the ruling BJP party disbelieves it as just some more obfuscation in a smoke and mirrors kind of intrigue.

Truth to tell, US regimes over the last several decades have been known to have worked overtime in bringing about regime changes. In fact, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a vaccine sceptic who is now the US health secretary, is on record as saying that the US may have brought about 50 changes of regime over the last seven decades.

It is a different matter that regime changes attributed to the US administration, or its deep state, have invariably invited disaster, as in Iraq and elsewhere like Bangladesh. So believable is the theory that the US has brought about regime changes as per its whims and fancies that the fund to get more voters to the booths is not to be dismissed out of hand.

And yet, given Indian expertise or lack of it at forensically proving money trails as witnessed in so many money laundering cases failing to get the accused convicted in a court of law, it is safe to assume that the mystery of the $21 million will remain a political football that will continue to be kicked here and there like in a soap opera.

The one factor that becomes most relevant in this case is that the US President Trump, who has spoken up most often in this regard, is so flippant about facts that the alternative reality he builds inevitably takes precedence over truth. For example, his inconsistencies in saying Volodymyr Zelenskyy is not needed in peace talks with Russia one day and saying on the next that the Ukrainian leader must sit with Vladimir Putin at the negotiating table is just the latest example of shifting opinions.

If official India, with the help of the Reserve Bank and the finance ministry which can track inward remittances, can establish who got US money for a seemingly inane democratic objective like a higher voting percentage in a country that already has the most voters in the world who exercise their franchise, they would be doing a lot to throw light on this fund flow for alleged regime change objectives. The pity is this controversy will fester rather than come to a quick conclusion.