How India has ramped up its crackdown on NGOs

The Indian government has a history of cracking down on the country’s nonprofit sector — and this year it has started to put more hurdles in place. Two separate letters issued at the end of last year by government ministries called for an end to fundraising campaigns run by Save the Children India and Sightsavers India, both U.K.-headquartered nonprofits with a long history of working in India, on the basis that government programs to tackle these issues already existed. The two NGOs’ advertisements have since been removed from the public domain. Previous Indian governments had cracked down on NGOs’ ability to receive money from abroad. But this is the first high-profile government attempt to limit fundraising within India. And Indian nonprofit leaders say they fear more scrutiny and more restrictions are on the way. A history of antagonism India has long had an adversarial relationship with the nonprofit sector, with previous governments introducing strict regulations on foreign donations under the guise of limiting foreign interference. But the situation has worsened since the current prime minister, Narendra Modi, came to power in 2014. In recent years, several large international NGOs such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace have had their bank accounts frozen, forcing them to suspend operations in the country. And in 2020, the government imposed an amendment to the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, or FCRA, the legislation which obliges civil society organizations to register for a license in order to legally receive foreign funds. The amendment increased restrictions on how funds could be spent and prohibited the transfer of foreign funds between organizations — drastically cutting the funding of many smaller or rural nonprofits, which rely on grants from larger organizations to fund their operations. The 2020 amendment also required organizations to re-register their license, said Aakar Patel, an author and activist and the current board chair of Amnesty International in India. He said this has given the government “the capacity to de-register organizations at will.” Since 2011, over 20,000 NGOs have lost their FCRA licenses, according to government data that was previously publicly available — including large international NGOs such as Oxfam. Many in the sector believe that the amendment was pushed in order to gain greater control over organizations that were critical of the government. “The restrictions that were brought in by the FCRA amendments were just to neutralize [non-profits’] role in society. They didn’t want them to come up any kind of counter-narrative,” said Kavita Srivastava, the national secretary of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, an organization dedicated to defending human rights and civil liberties in India. New threats to domestic funding? Many in the sector fear that the recent letters issued by government ministries are a harbinger of new restrictions to come, with domestic sources of funding being targeted as well. “They want that critical voice to go. So you cut the FCRA. And now local funding they have gotten too,” says Srivastava. One of the letters was first published in November; it was from the Ministry of Women and Child Development and addressed to state governments. It criticized a fundraising campaign by Save the Children India, which was requesting 800 Indian rupees ($10) from the public in order to tackle childhood malnutrition. The letter said the campaign involved “false information” because childhood malnutrition was “already being vigorously pursued by the government” through various programs, and asked state governments to “alert beneficiaries about false claims” made by similar NGOs. But Srivastava said it was not clear which guidelines had been broken. “What is the false information that Save the Children is propagating?” she said. “I don’t know. You do have malnutrition. It is the truth.” “It’s very clear that they want nobody else but the government to be present,” she added. “They don’t want any dissemination of knowledge.” According to India’s latest national family health survey, which is based on data collected in 2019-2020, child undernutrition had increased in multiple states over the preceding five-year period. Last year, India was ranked 107 out of 121 countries in the Global Hunger Index, a peer-reviewed annual report published by Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe. A press release from the Ministry of Women and Child Development, however, called the index an “erroneous measure of hunger” and accused the findings of being an effort to “taint India’s image as a Nation.” If organizations draw attention to the issue of malnutrition, “The government feels you are shaming India; it’s literally become that,” says Srivastava. Screenshots published by Indian news outlet Article 14 show that shortly after the letter from the Ministry of Women and Child Development was sent, the wording on Save the Children India’s website was changed to emphasize the program’s collaborative nature with various government programs. The other letter was issued in December by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare to Sightsavers India. The NGO was requested to “consider halting” one of its fundraising campaigns. Sightsavers India has worked to eliminate avoidable blindness and advocate for disability rights in India since 1966. The letter pointed out that the government of India was already running a national program on blindness control and visual impairment which was “absolutely free,” and contended that the NGO’s request for donations was therefore “against the spirit” of the government program. Neither of the ministries nor their respective press information bureau secretaries responded to requests for comment on this article. Neither Save the Children India nor Sightsavers India responded to requests for comment too. Various other NGOs contacted by Devex for this article also declined to comment, citing fear of reprisals. A silencing of civil society Srivastava said that civil society organizations in India are falling silent out of fear of further reprisals. “A lot of them have withdrawn from any kind of public space to just save their FCRA [licence],” she said. “Nobody wants to be called anti-national.” “There is certainly an element of self-censorship,” Amnesty International’s Patel added. “When people are jailed for speaking the truth, locked up for saying things even in anodyne fashion, many will be and are fearful of expressing opinion.” “Even stating fact gets one into trouble in New India,” he added. The “open hostility” of the government has made it increasingly difficult for NGOs to operate, Patel said. “The sector recognises that the State is the largest agent of change and it wants to work with the State in collaborative fashion,” he said. “But this is not possible when the government sees civil society as a competitor, if not an enemy.” This extends beyond nonprofits, with increasing crackdowns on civic freedoms across the country seen in recent years. The early months of 2023 have witnessed a raid on the BBC’s India offices by tax department officials, and an internet shutdown over several days for the entire state of Punjab. In 2021, India’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval gave a speech to police officer trainees in which he called civil society the “new frontier of war,” warning that it could “hurt the interest of the nation.” But the role of civil society in a democracy is to hold the government to account, says Srivastava, who worries that a shrinking civil society in India is indicative of an alarming democratic backsliding. “The way dissent is crushed, the way freedom of speech and expression is being crushed. Where is it a democracy?” she asks. “In no other democracy do we see the government behave in this fashion with NGOs,” agrees Patel. In February, a court order quashed the 2018 notice for blocking Amnesty’s bank account, although other cases are ongoing and the organization still does not have access to its accounts. The global civil society alliance Civicus downgraded India’s status to repressed in its 2019 report on global civic freedoms, noting, in particular, the detention of and violence against activists and journalists in the country, the use of sedition laws to silence critics of the government, and the use of the FCRA to restrict or investigate CSOs. “Given the size and global role of India, the decline in the quality of its civic space must be of particular concern,” the report states.