Startling details have emerged regarding the functioning of PETA India since the latest controversy over Bakr-Eid. The supposed animal rights NGO also ran an anti-leather campaign geared towards the Hindu festival of Rakshabandhan, which angered people on social media as they could not fathom where was the consumption of leather involved during the festival.
Soon after, PETA India ran an organised campaign against a columnist in cohorts with Congress and Islamists after she dared to criticised them. Now, it has been brought to notice that PETA India has a foreigner as its chief functionary. In response to criticism by columnist Shefali Vaidya, it claimed that it was a different organisation than the PETA USA.
While technically it could still claim it is different than the PETA USA, details about the organisation reveals that it is not really the case. For all intent and purposes, PETA India is a branch of PETA International and they cannot really shy away from it. Expert on foreign funded NGOs, @by2kaafi, pointed out that the Chief Functionary of PETA India was Ingrid Newkirk and it has three foreign functionaries in its ranks.
Then, PETA India straight up lied and denied that Ingrid Newkirk was their chief functionary. They claimed that she is their founder but not the Chief Functionary. Furthermore, they accused the expert on FCRA NGOs of deliberately misrepresenting the organisation. However, as evidence, @by2kaafi pointed out to the submissions the organisation had made to the Home Ministry as per requirements under the FCRA regulations.
You are wrong about foreign key functionaries, Ingrid Newkirk, who grew up in Delhi, was our founder, she is not a Chief Functionary, and PETA India does not send money to PETA US and so on. What is your motive for misrepresenting PETA India?
— PETA India (@PetaIndia) July 19, 2020
According to the submissions made by PETA India to the Home Ministry for the financial year 2018-19, which are accessible to the public on the official government website dedicated to FCRA NGOs, the organisation itself recognised Ingrid Newkirk as their Chief Functionary. The submissions require the name and signature of the Chief Functionary and Ingrid Newkirk declared herself as the person holding the position in its FCRA submission.
The submissions reveal that there are 3 foreign functionaries working currently at PETA India, however, their names are not revealed. OpIndia attempted to access the names through the information available on Darpan NGO, another government initiative, but it was revealed they had not made that bit of information public.
OpIndia also checked the official website of PETA India but the information was not made readily available to the public there as well and OpIndia could not find it on the website. But their submissions to the Home Ministry confirm that there are three foreign functionaries working at the organisation.
Furthermore, the FCRA submissions reveal that PETA India received Rs. 6,61,28,940.00 from PETA US during the financial year 2018-19. The total foreign contribution received during the same period was Rs. 6,67,28,942.00. Thus, quite clearly, almost the entire foreign contribution to the organisation came from PETA USA.
It also needs to be pointed out here that Ingrid Newkirk, the Chief Functionary of it, is not an Indian citizen. Her Wikipedia page says that she holds British and American citizenship. While it is true that she spent a small period of her life in New Delhi while growing up, she appears to be a foreigner herself. She is also the founder of PETA International.
According to her biography on her personal website, Ingrid Newkirk was living with her husband in the United States at the age of 21. It states further, “Ingrid has also served as a deputy sheriff, a Maryland state law enforcement officer with the highest success rate in convicting animal abusers, the director of cruelty investigations for the second-oldest humane society in the U.S., and the chief of animal disease control for the Commission on Public Health in Washington, D.C.”
Thus, quite clearly, the Chief Functionary of PETA India itself is not an Indian citizen. And the Chief Functionary of it is the founder of PETA, the international organisation. PETA India quite clearly lied when it claimed that Newkirk wasn’t their chief functionary. However, it is interesting that they did not deny the fact that three of their functionaries are foreign assets.
