Amrit Singh (Manmohan Singh’s Daughter)

Some Lesser Known Facts Amrit Singh

• Amrit Singh is an Indian-American human rights lawyer for national security and counterterrorism at the New York-based Open Society Justice Initiative. She came into the limelight for her outspoken campaign against the Bush administration’s contempt for civil liberties. She is the youngest daughter of the Former Prime Minister of India Manmohan Singh.

• Manmohan Singh and his family moved to New York in 1966, where he worked for UNCTAD. However, Manmohan and Gursharan desired their daughters to grow up in India with Indian values. Therefore, they returned to India to live in Dehli in 1969 after Amrit Singh’s birth.

  

• Growing up, Amrit Singh and her sisters, Daman and Upinder, were voracious readers. The habit of reading was instilled in them by their father. Daman recalled their childhood memories in an interview and said,
  

  Our most exciting outing was when our father took us to a bookshop. Our birthday presents were always books. There was a time when we lived walking distance away from the Delhi Gymkhana Club, which has an excellent library. I recall fighting with my sisters over the library cards, borrowing two books, hurrying home and racing to finish them just so that I could borrow the next two.”

  

• All three of the daughters of Manmohan Singh are married outside the Sikh faith. An excerpt from Daman Singh’s book Strictly Personal: Manmohan and Gursharan (2014) stated that Manmohan and Gursharan did not approve of Upinder’s marriage to Vijay Tankha at first because he wasn’t a Sikh. It took them quite a while to accept Vijay as their son-in-law. Eventually, they grew to like him and accepted him. There was way less family drama when Daman married IPS officer Ashok Patnaik. By the time it was Amrit’s turn to marry, Manmohan and Gursharan happily came on board.

• Manmohan Singh’s mother’s name is also Amrit. She died when Manmohan was still an infant.

• She served as a Judicial Law Clerk at the United States District Court, Southern District of New York from September 2001 to August 2002.

• In July 2002, she enrolled as a lawyer with the New York State Bar Association.

• In the same year, she started working with the non-profit organisation American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as a Staff Attorney for the Immigrants’ Rights Project. She litigated immigrants’ rights and national security cases like post-9/11-related abuses at the ACLU, including landmark litigation that exposed the Bush administration’s systematic abuse suffered by detainees caught in the net of America’s “war on terror.” Singh worked on strategic litigation, documentation, and advocacy on human rights issues relating to counterterrorism measures such as challenging extremism, freedom of expression restraints, extrajudicial killings, rendition, torture, and arbitrary detention. She served at ACLU till 2009.

• She gained recognition in 2006 for her work in the Ali vs Rumsfeld case. The case was filed against US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld on behalf of Iraqi and Afghan detainees who were tortured in American custody.

• She was honoured at the South Asian Bar Association of New York Awards (2006).

  

• She co-authored the report Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record From Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond (2009), which claimed that the Bush administration condoned torture in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks.

• Amrit started working as a Senior Legal Officer at Open Society Foundations’ justice branch in New York in September 2009. Founded and chaired by business magnate George Soros, Open Society Foundations (OSF) is a grantmaking network which financially supports civil society groups around the world with the aim of advancing justice, education, public health and independent media. At Open Society Justice Initiative, she oversees projects on economic justice, anti-corruption, freedom of information, association and assembly, and the Liberty and Transparency division.

• She filed papers demanding the White House, the FBI, and other government agencies to produce all records in their possession relating to the destruction of two videotapes by CIA operatives in 2005 that showed harsh interrogations of two prisoners in US custody, Abu Zubaida and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Nashiri is a Saudi national who was captured in Dubai, UAE in October 2002 and transferred to a secret CIA prison for torture. From May 2011 to July 2014, Singh served as counsel on behalf of al-Nashiri in proceedings before the European Court of Human Rights against Poland and Romania. On 20 April 2011, United States military commissions prosecutors brought charges against him stating their intent to seek the death penalty in his case. However, Singh’s efforts led to a judgment in al-Nashri’s favour on 24 July 2014.

• Singh’s report ‘Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Torture and Extraordinary Rendition’ (2012) published by the Open Society Justice Initiative, received widespread attention in the international media for its close look at America’s global torture network. The report authored by Singh stated 54 countries including Pakistan, assisted the US in its war against al-Qaida by hosting CIA prisons on their territories and detaining, interrogating, and torturing terror suspects.
  

• She received the India Abroad Publisher’s Special Award for Excellence in 2012.

  

• In 2014, Judge James Boasberg in the District of Columbia allowed the service of summons on Amrit Singh in a rights violation suit against her father, Manmohan Singh. In 2013, US resident Inderjit Singh, a member of Sikhs For Justice (SFJ), claimed that when Manmohan Singh was a finance minister, he funded several counter-insurgency operations in Punjab resulting in thousands of extra-judicial killings of Sikhs. Therefore, SFJ filed a leave motion pleading to allow service of summons on his daughter Amrit Singh, who is a permanent resident of the United States, through alternative means on the defendant.

• She penned the report Death by Drone (2015), which questioned President Obama about whether he kept his 2013 promise which stated that before any U.S. drone strike, “there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured.”
  

• She was promoted to the position of Director of Accountability Division at OSF in February 2016.

• In the same year, she published the report Eroding Trust: The UK’s Prevent Counter-Extremism Strategy in Health and Education under the Open Society Justice Initiative.
  

• She was also on counsel in litigation seeking accountability for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who was assassinated on 2 October 2018 at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by agents of the Saudi government allegedly at the behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

• Apart from that, she successfully challenged Egypt’s emergency law, torture and arbitrary detention practices before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights.

• She has served as a visiting lecturer in law at Yale Law School and New York University.

• In April 2019, a journalist at The Times of India named Bharti Jain made serious allegations of fraud against Manmohan Singh via a tweet alleging that his daughters Daman and Amrit drew a salary from the Nalanda University (NU) as faculty members while staying in the US. Bharti Jain highlighted financial misconduct and nepotism against Nobel laureate Amartya Sen through a series of tweets. Fact-checking website Alt News Desk clarified that the statement was false. ^[3]The Wire

• In 2020, the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation came under public scrutiny for receiving donations from foreign organisations following which it was accused of compromising the sovereignty of a nation. It was discovered that China had paid the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation (RGF) over Rs. 1 crore during the UPA regime. Additionally, deep ties were discovered between Congress and philanthropist George Soros, who openly criticised the Narendra Modi government at World Economic Forum in Davos in 2023 for promoting India as a Hindu national state. He said,
  

  The biggest and most frightening setback occurred in India where a democratically elected Narendra Modi is creating a Hindu nationalist state, imposing punitive measures on Kashmir, a semi-autonomous Muslim region, and threatening to deprive millions of Muslims of their citizenship.”

  The ties depicted that George Soros had a disproportionate influence over the Congress party through his complex network of NGOs. Consequently, Amrit Singh also came under public scrutiny for her association with Soros’ Open Society Foundations.