Piloting the Bill in Parliament, Union Minister of State for Home Nityanand Rai said the new draft law aims to enhance transparency and ensure proper utlisation of funds.
The Bill was opposed in Lok Sabha by Congress member Manish Tewari, who said the government proposal "suffers from" excessive delegation of essential legislative functions".
Now a key leader from the Congress party from poll-bound Kerala K C Venugopal says the The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill that the Narendra Modi government has introduced in Parliament targets minority communities and charitable organisations,
He has taken up the matter days after the top Catholic Christian body in India flagged the bill as one that enables “undue interference in minority institutions.”
The FCRA bill was aimed at bringing Christian communities under control and was "hanging over minorities like a sword of Damocles," said Venugopal, who is alsi AICC general secretary (Organisation) and could even become next chief minister of Kerala.
The official stand of the Ministry of Home Affairs is that the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) norms are liable to be reviewed from time to time.
In 2015, the Modi government canceled the FCRA licenses of about 10,000 organizations including Green Peace, Ford Foundation and some 20 Christian organizations. Another 1,807 NGOs lost theirs in 2019. In 2020, a government order said these organizations will not be eligible to apply for a fresh license for a period of three years.
An FCRA license is mandatory to receive foreign donations in India.
In 2021, came the turn of a plethora of institutions like Oxfam India, Hamdard Education Society, Indian Institute of Technology (Delhi), Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA), Indian Institute of Public Administration, National Foundation for Communal Harmony (NFCH), Nehru Museum, Delhi College of Engineering, Goa Football Association, and Press Institute of India. They faced FCRA hurdles.
Venugopal said provisions in the proposed amendments would restrict the functioning of charitable organisations and enable greater central intervention.
He echoed what the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India has said.
The apex body of the Catholic Church in India had said that the proposed changes to the law, "brought under the pretext of licence renewal", could enable "executive overreach" into constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, raising serious concerns about "undue interference" in the functioning of minority institutions.
The conference objected to “clauses that grant sweeping powers to the Central Government, allowing it to deny renewal or cancel licenses of organizations. More significantly, the proposed framework would permit a newly constituted authority to assume control over institutions, including their funds, properties, and other assets.”
Earlier Congress MP Manish Tewari had said - "Core aspects such as the manner of vesting, management, disposal of assets .... are left to be prescribed by the central government through rules".
The Congress party had earlier warned, during discussions on the Waqf amendment bill, that similar legislation could be brought by the Modi government affecting other minority communities too.
However, the argument goes there are often sufficient reasons often for the government to initiate stricter actions.
A few social workers have said in the northeastern state of Assam that some NGOs did and perhaps continue to ‘misuse’ the foreign funds.
There are organizations supposed to be working for leprosy or mental healthcare. But when their activists took part in the anti-CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) protests in 2020 January, there were talks in Assam that some adverse reactions were as on the cards.
Some may call this vindictiveness.
But officials in Delhi said in 2021 that funds meant for curing leprosy could not be used to raise anti-India slogans and banners during the farmers' stir.
It has also come to light that a few organizations like bureaucrat-turned-activist Harsh Mander’s Center for Equity Studies and Oxfam India were in the past accused by right-wing bodies of ‘misusing funds’ to fuel the February 2020 riots in Delhi.
Mander is seen as someone close to Congress president Sonia Gandhi.
“The Hindu-Muslim carnage took place in Delhi around the time US President Donald Trump was in India. The government was obviously left red-faced though Trump skirted the issue,” says Reba Das of Trinamool Congress.
Notably, in November 2021, PM Narendra Modi’s trusted aide and National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval had cautioned police officials about one new generation enemy, that is the social organizations.
But subsequent questions have often been controversial.
In Dec 2021; it was made public that the Ministry of Home Affairs had refused to renew the FCRA registration of Missionaries of Charity, which was founded by Mother Teresa.
Such inferences are denied outright at the official level.
“The law takes its own course... sometimes things move slowly and at other times faster to meet the deadlines,” is the oft-repeated refrain.
Many agree that the loss of funding from overseas do hamper the work of NGOs.
A sample of this - reportedly - was witnessed during the second wave of coronavirus in early 2021.
PM Narendra Modi had asked officials in May 2021 to explore involving civil society volunteers to take the pressure off the healthcare sector amid the surge in Covid-19 cases but "nothing much could be done in the absence of resources" with these NGOs, it was claimed.
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| 2021 - Siliguri - Children from weaker sections attend a makeshift, open-air school |
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