Like the UPA, the NDA turns the heat on NGOs, charging them with financial irregularities, and fomenting social and political unrest.
By Shantanu Guha Ray
Around the time when the 82 page note compiled by the Intelligence Bureau (IB) against NGOs or non-governmental organizations receiving foreign funds made headlines, another tome was in circulation in the capital. In a city where documents are routinely sourced at a cost by lobbyists and lawyers for their clients, this one made interesting reading.
The note, offered in spiral bound, was a compilation of court records, confidential documents and e-mail exchanges that mentioned countless charges against Teesta Setalvad, the Mumbai-based civil rights activist. Compiled by Manjula Gupta, a Supreme Court advocate, it offered evidence against Setalvad, whose NGO, Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), is a co-petitioner seeking criminal trial of Narendra Modi, the former chief minister of Gujarat and India’s current prime minister, along with 62 other politicians and government officials, for complicity in the pogrom that wreaked havoc in Gujarat in 2002.
Titled, “Teesta Setalvad: The Queen of Perjury, Lies and Deceit,” the report revolved around a host of issues, important ones being how Setalvad allegedly pushed for false affidavits to be filed in the Naroda case in Gujarat, paid cash to riot witnesses to file false statements, illegally dug up graves of riot victims, violated Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA) and Companies Act to receive global grants and used the cash meant for rehabilitating riot victims and their families for personal benefits that included dining at glitzy hotels, hair treatment at expensive spas, purchasing hi-end dress material from top-end stores, and buying liquor and jewelery.
The document, it is reliably learnt, found its way to the home ministry, whose officers are in the process of checking the ante-cedents of Setalvad’s organization along with records, backgrounds and operations of nearly 30,000 NGOs in India.
Setalvad has said she is not worried and would answer queries when posed by the ministry. As for liquors, she quipped she was in Maharashtra and not in a prohibition state like Gujarat.
The heat is on
The home ministry exercise, claim insiders, is being conducted to decide if NGOs can continue to receive grants under FCRA, 2010. On paper, this is the result of changes the UPA government brought to the 1976 law in 2010, requiring all NGOs to renew their clearances every five years. After the renewed clearances in 2011-12, NGOs required a fresh one in 2015 or 2016. But now, it is coming in handy for the BJP-led NDA government, which wants to keep a tab on the NGOs. “The home ministry survey will happen when all NGOs, or at least majority of them, are under fire from the government because of their international funding,” points out Praful Bidwai, a columnist and anti-nuclear activist.
But those in the government are shielding themselves with the guidebook. The rules are clear; they say once an NGO applies, the ministry will complete verification within 90 days.
Bidwai says the NGOs are preparing for worse, a total chaos in 2016. After all, in the last spring cleaning in 2011-12, the ministry had carried out 132 inspections. And many had then faced severe difficulties. Under the NDA regime, the inspections may be
more intense.
On the flip side, there are ample chances that the ministry’s work will be reduced; it may take less time then the previous survey. For the record, 43,000 NGOs are officially registered but no one knows how many are operational. On paper, NGOs got the clearances right after the 1976 law was passed, a year after the emergency. But there are others whose clearances are on hold.
Worse, there is no provision for an NGO to surrender a clearance even if it has stopped working. “As a result, many NGOs are holding on to their clearances for years despite closing shop,” says Harsh Jaitli who heads the Voluntary Action Network
India (VANI).
INSUFFICIENT DATA
The NGO business is a peculiar one, ostensibly because the government just cannot find out how many NGOs are working and how many are dead. Consider the case of an estimated 4,000 NGOs, which drew flak for not filing returns on time. Even those who did, found their records missing because the ministry has an archaic method of maintaining records.
And each time a division shifts office, the first things that go missing are the records. It was after two big cases of records missing from the foreigner division office in 2010-11 that officials started shifting to an online process. Not just the NGOs, even the home ministry is under a judicial heat. Recently, the Delhi High Court gave the ministry six months to probe foreign funding of two NGOs for getting funds from Vedanta Resources, a UK-based company, allegedly in violation of the law. The ministry, the court noted with regret, had failed to take action against the two NGOs.
As per the government records, NGOs in India had received `11,546 crore from various international organizations in 2011-12, the majority coming from the United States. Of these, 20,297 grants were below `1 crore and 148 above `10 crore. Interestingly, some of the funds came from countries like Rwanda, Latvia, Angola, Tonga, Malawi and Suriname—all in troubled political state.
Not all lethal
“The BJP government is pushing a lethal agenda to silence the work these NGOs are doing because of sheer corporate pressures,” says Brinda Karat, MP and senior Politburo member of the CPM.
Karat says it is unfortunate that in India, the government defines the FCRA as a national security legislation piece but it does not define public interest. “Actually, the term is used by various governments to suspend or cancel a clearance. Do not forget that when the UPA government suspended Indian Social Action Forum’s clearance in the public interest, the decision was dismissed by a court,” says Karat.
Ministry officials counter her argument, saying suspension of FCRA permission followed by cancellations is a long process. “We normally avoid it because it is difficult to defend such decisions in court. Under this law, punishment starts before investigation. The first action is freezing of the FCRA account. Now, the probe takes years but law requires a decision in six months,” says an official requesting anonymity. Officials also say there is no doubt some of the NGOs have a distinct anti-government agenda but it would be wrong to paint all with the same brush. The ministry, till date, has not accused a single NGO of using the FCRA process to launder money.
“Some of the donors, like bilateral aid agencies from developed nations, also have an agenda. There are cases where brokers have worked with NGOs to get clearances for the right prices. But it would be ridiculous to claim that you can dent a nation’s GDP by spending, say `10 crore a year, in a public campaign,” says an official.The FCRA is a contentious law. It came in 1976, at the height of the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi, prohibiting political parties and “organizations of political nature”, civil servants and judges, as also correspondents, columnists and editors/owners of registered newspapers and news broadcasting organizations—and even cartoonists—from receiving foreign contributions.
Interestingly, when this FCRA was debated in the Rajya Sabha on March 9, 1976, old timers recall that the term “CIA” (Central Intelligence Agency) was mentioned at least 30 times by different legislators, while “Lockheed Martin” (a military aerospace corporation) came up at least six times in the context of alleged instances of Americans pumping dollars into governments worldwide to buy influence during the Cold War.
Khurshid Alam Khan, father of former minister for external affairs Salman Khurshid, told a stunned house: “The CIA’s doings all over the world have very clearly indicated as to what could be done by foreign money and foreign interference.”
And in 2010, an altogether different parliament, consisting of opposition members who had not been imprisoned like those in 1976, unanimously voted to update the law through amendments. A parliamentary standing committee that examined the bill was headed by the BJP’s leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, Sushma Swaraj—she is now the current external affairs minister— and had no major objections to it.
Except, the concern was focused on what many felt was an increasing influence of NGOs as institutions of civil society in India. Almost like the term CIA, the term NGO found at least 40 mentions during the Rajya Sabha debate on the 2010 bill.
Now, New Delhi wants to react. Acting on the IB report, which pointed out that a few NGOs were involved in political activities that were not allowed under FCRA, it wants all funding and activities to be transparent.
The NGOs are distinctly uncomfortable. Hit by the charges made by intelligence agencies, some allege pro-Hindu NGOs of receiving donations from abroad and using the same for “communal agenda”.
Once the IB report made headlines, left-leaning groups talked of funds garnered by RSS and Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation of India (EVFI), an affiliate of BJP. The EVFI receives `20 crore annually from abroad to run single-teacher schools patronized by the RSS. Some say the schools have a communal agenda but others have backed these for exemplary work in the countryside.
On the other hand, sympathizers of the RSS point to larger global funding from Christian organizations for schools, healthcare, political activities and even news organizations in India.
By all standards, there remains a huge, grey area in NGOs and their operations across various sectors in India. The slugfest is likely to continue.
Belligerent government
Anti-nuclear activist and Aam Aadmi Party’s Lok Sabha candidate from Kanyakumari, SP Udaya Kumar says the charge that he was working at the behest of foreign powers to subvert India’s development was baseless because the IB offered no evidence to support these claims. “I and my family feel threatened after the IB report was made public,” he said in a telephonic interview.
The IB report claimed Udaya Kumar, active in protests against the Kudankulam nuclear plant, had “deep and growing connections with US and German entities.” It goes on to say that the activist received an “unsolicited contract” from an Ohio State University institute, through which he got thousands of dollars from the US for filing fortnightly reports.
Udaya Kumar says his work had nothing to do with nuclear energy. “The government wants to discredit my research that goes against the government,” he further said. But New Delhi is in no mood to relent.
Ever since the prime minister went public with his discomfort about the foreign funding of NGOs in issues sensitive to India’s economic growth, bank accounts of four NGOs in Tamil Nadu had been frozen, with the home ministry accusing them of diverting funds to fuel the agitation.
Big Brother is on the prowl, all NGOs agree. The new regulatory mechanisms include the stringent FCRA, 2010, which came into effect as of May 1, 2011, to regulate funding of NGOs from abroad.
Worse, a list of 77 international NGOs working in India has been circulated to Indian missions abroad for “appropriate action”. The list, mostly from the US and Europe, was issued last year on two grounds—financial irregularities and the kind of work the NGOs were doing to create social unrest.
In short, there will be a distinct change in the climate for international funders and NGOs operating in India, especially when it comes to get foreign funding.
Interestingly, the new FCRA regime has not gone unnoticed by the international community. UN Special Rapporteur Margaret Seggakya has already expressed her concerns to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, arguing how some of the provisions of the new law “may lead to abuse by the authorities when reviewing applications of organizations, which are critical
of authorities.”
It is a cat and mouse game.
Medha Patkar’s Narmada Bachao Andolan, which has been fighting for the rights of the people affected by projects in the Narmada Valley, is mentioned in the
IB report.
Columnist and anti-nuclear activist Praful Bidwai feels that the home ministry’s scrutiny against NGOs will only happen if they come under fire from the government over foreign funding.
Anti-nuclear activist and AAP party MP SP Udaya Kumar says the center is targetting him for protests against the Kundankulam nuclear plant and feels threatened after the IB report.
Teesta Setalvad’s NGO, Citizens for Justice and Peace, has been accused of misusing foreign grants for rehabilitating riot victims and their families in Gujarat. She remains unfazed.