By Aakar Patel
What cannot be passed in Parliament as law can be incarnated as a change in the rules. The effect on the world is the same and the object is achieved. This is not what democratic nations ought to be doing, but then there is a real good reason why India is now, so many years after 1947, classified as being ‘partly free’ and not a real democracy.
This March, the government introduced a bill to attack, yet again, non-governmental organisations. This is a sector to which, it must be clarified at the outset, the RSS does not belong because it is not a registered entity and does not therefore exist.
The bill could not pass after the Opposition did what it should do more often: Oppose. The Prime Minister, with his 240 MPs, took his bill and went home. And then he reintroduced its essence as a change in ‘rules’ to the existing law, something that does not require Parliamentary assent.
Exactly like the introduction of the Special Intensive Revision, which did the disenfranchisement job through ‘rules’ that the National Register of Citizens could not do through law.
The current attack on the NGOs continues the effort to shut the sector down. It is aimed at those receiving foreign funding and the familiar tropes of national security and foreign hand and the rest have been invoked. At the outset, it must be clarified that PM Cares is not covered here because it is neither a government entity — and therefore outside the purview of RTI — nor is it an NGO — and therefore cannot be held to the same standard. It is a mythical creature.
Anyway, the new rules say a few things to hamper NGO work. Some of them are as follows. NGOs can only conduct those activities that are in a schedule provided by the government. The government will also meddle in where an NGO can function. An NGO’s ‘chief functionary’ is not just its chief functionary, but also all of its trustees and office bearers, and foreigners are not eligible.
They must declare their social media accounts and not publish things the government considers to be political. And so on and on. Why are these rules not applied to the rest of the private sector (which is what ‘non-government’ means)? This is hard to say. Corporates can bring in as much foreign investment as they want and are lauded for this. They can hire foreign CEOs, and our own Indian CEOs in America are heroes.
There are other very obvious hypocrisies also. In January 2013, a Public Interest Litigation was filed in Delhi High Court claiming that the BJP and the Congress had received donations from the same foreign company, Vedanta/Sterlite, which were in violation of the FCRA Act.
On 28 March 2014, the court held that the BJP and Congress were guilty of FCRA violation and, in May, asked the Modi government and the EC to act against the two parties.
By October 2015, the Modi government had figured a way out. A change in the law would define any company registered in India, regardless of who owned it, as an Indian company. In essence, ‘foreign’ was redefined as ‘Indian’, which was a fraud on the Indian people, but because both major parties were complicit in the fraud, it passed without resistance.
For the rest of us the rules are different. In 2020, the government introduced more of them. First, that the 23,000-odd NGOs which had a license to receive foreign money could receive funds only in a single branch of the State Bank of India — the one at Sansad Marg in New Delhi. Only 1,488 NGOs were registered in Delhi, and so the rest would have to come to the city to open an account. The branch would report to the Home ministry the details of the remittance, the sources and manner in which it was received.
The second change was that the NGO could spend only 20 per cent of the money it received on ‘administrative expenses’. Salaries, travel expenses, the cost of hiring individuals, consumables like electricity and water charges, telephone charges, postal and courier charges, repairs to the office, stationery and printing charges, transport, the cost of accounting for and administering funds, running and maintenance of vehicles, cost of writing and filing reports, legal and professional charges and rent were all classified as administrative expenses.
No more than 20 per cent of their foreign funding could be spent on these things (keep in mind that such restrictions are not applicable to any other sector in India). This would affect those organisations whose work concerned research and advocacy and other things that required hiring professionals such as lawyers and academics, and were unrelated to pure brick-and-mortar activity, such as building hospitals and schools. Third, the law now prevented an NGO from redistribution of funds it had received to other NGOs even if they were FCRA-compliant. This would hit the sector because NGOs do not compete with one another as the rest of the private sector does; they operate as networks. This change would damage their alliances and capacity to work with one another. Larger NGOs could no longer work with smaller ones, especially those organisations working on the ground that had no means of or expertise in raising money themselves.
And now more rules in 2026. All of this accompanied by the astonishing slogan of ‘minimum government maximum governance’.