“India Unsafe For Investment”: Ad In Wall Street Journal, Govt Says It Is An Attack on India’s Sovereignty

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Photo credit: Twitter.

Syed Khalique Ahmed

NEW DELHI—When Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman was in the US attending World Bank-IMF meetings last week, a full-page advertisement in The Wall Street Journal said that India is “unsafe for investment”. It advocated for an “economic and visa sanction” against her and ten other Indian officials, including two judges of the Supreme Court and senior officials from some investigating agencies. However, the Government of India slammed the advertisement, saying it amounts to an assault on India’s sovereignty.

The advertisement alleged that Modi government officials, including Nirmala Sitharaman, have “decimated the rule of law by weaponizing the institutions of the state to settle scores with political and business rivals, making India unsafe for investors.”

“If you are an investor in India, you might be the next,” the ad said.

“Under the Modi government, a decline in the rule of law has made India a dangerous place to invest,” the ad alleged.

Besides Sitharaman, among the officials mentioned in the ad are Supreme Court judges V. Ramasubramaian and Hemant Gupta, Assistant Director in Enforcement Directorate R. Rajesh, Chairman of Antrix Corp Ltd. (business arm of Indian Space Research Organization) Rakesh Sasibhushan, Special (Prevention of Corruption) Act Judge Chandra Shekhar, Additional Solicitor General N. Venkataraman, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, Deputy Superintendent of Police(CBI) Ashish Pareek, Deputy Director (Enforcement Directorate) A. Sadiq Mohammed Naijnar and Director(Enforcement Directorate) Sanjay Kumar Mishra.

“We have asked the US government to impose economic and visa sanctions against them under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act,” the ad stated. The ad has dubbed the 11 Indian officials, including finance Minister Sitharaman, “Modi’s Magnitsky 11”. 

The Act empowers the US government to sanction foreign government officials, freeze their assets and ban their entry into the US for human rights violations.

The ad is believed to have been inserted on behalf of an Indian businessman Ramchandran Vishwanathan and his friends in the US-based think tank “Frontiers of Freedom Foundation.” The Frontier of Freedom is believed to be behind the ad because a QR code at the bottom of the ad leads one to the website of Frontiers of Freedom.

Two tweets by George Landrith, president of Frontiers of Freedom(FF), after the ad appeared in the WSJ, also prove that the organization sponsored the ad. Landrith’s message claims that FF has exposed “#IndiasMagnitsky11 and #FinMinIndia @NirmalaSitharaman’s actions that have decimated the rule of law and investment climate in India.” 

Another post on Twitter by Landrith says, “the actions of #IndiasMagnitsky11, @NSitharaman, @NarendraModi & BJP4India send a clear message to potential investors in India: India is a dangerous place to invest.”

Vishwanathan is Devas’s former Chief Executive Officer (CEO), allegedly involved in financial irregularities in a deal between Devas and Antrix, the business arm of the Department of Space, in 2005. Devas and Antrix had signed a contract to deliver multimedia content via satellite and terrestrial systems. Devas were to pay Antrix a reservation fee of $20 million per satellite and a lease fee of $9 million to 11.25 million a year. But a dispute between the two led to the Government of India cancelling the deal.

This resulted in a legal battle between Devas and Antrix. The Supreme Court in January this year ruled that Devas was involved in fraud in the deal with Antrix. Following this, Devas moved to a US court with the help of Frontiers of Freedom International and won an award of $1.2 billion. It is now trying to claim it from India.

Meanwhile, the US court has allowed Devas to seize cash and assets owned by Antrix in the US. 

Meanwhile, the Indian government is trying to use the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty in Criminal Matters between India and the US to arrest and deport Vishwanathan. Media reports say that it is the efforts by the Indian government to seek Vishwanathan’s extradition that motivated FF to place an ad in the Wall Street Journal.

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