an estimated 20,000 development organizations – 50 percent of which are Christian, BosNewsLife monitored Tuesday, February 13.
The amendment would enable authorities to revoke registration at any time, said Compass Direct News, a Christian news organization in an investigative news report.
At present, registration to receive foreign funding is granted indefinitely, but the Foreign Contributions Regulation Bill would obligate social service organizations receiving foreign funding to re-register every five years, Compass Direct News reported.
The provision could prove crippling to some organizations, including the Christian charity Emmanuel Mission International (EMI), Indian Christians said. The EMI group is still fighting a long-standing legal battle with the government of Rajasthan state after the state registrar arbitrarily dismissed registrations for five EMI social institutions in February 2006 and froze EMI’s bank accounts for several weeks.
LAW "ABUSED"
The state revoked the EMI registrations due to two alleged minor violations of regulations. Indian Christians say the measures show how the existing law can be "abused", as these actions "severely disrupted" charity work in EMI’s orphanages and hospitals.
The proposed amendment to the FCRA would reportedly discourage non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from establishing long-term projects such as school and hospitals as approval for foreign funding for these projects could be revoked after, or even before, a five-year period expired.
India’s government has defended the amendment saying it is needed "to keep a check" on militant and separatist organizations that raise funds abroad for "anti-national" activities.
In published remarks, representatives of NGOs said however that the amendment was "an insult" to their work. “The government is criminalizing the social sector,” John Dayal, secretary general of the All India Christian Council said in a statement. "Groups like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [RSS, a Hindu nationalist organization] get their funds through undeclared channels. The amendment won’t affect them."
SHUT DOWN
If the amendment becomes law, "thousands of organizations working among the needy, especially in rural areas, will shut down, because this law will prevent them from planning any long-term activity," Dayal added.
Dayal and other pressure groups were expected to take up the issue with a parliamentary committee before the bill is introduced to Parliament at the end of February.
In the 1980s, the FCRA was used "indiscriminately" by successive Congress Party governments as a "political weapon" to settle scores with their political opponents, Compass Direct News commented. Vocal critics of the government were allegedly prosecuted under the FCRA, with or without evidence and organizations run by political opponents often met the same fate.
Critics say the bill to amend the FCRA was the brainchild of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which introduced it to restrict Christian charity work. Professor Babu Mathew, director of ActionAid – which has worked among some of India ’s poorest communities since 1972 – said the amendment was a move to replace healthy regulation with "unhealthy" control.
CIVIL SERVANTS
Under the new terms, civil servants would decide what type of social service was unacceptable and “political” in nature, which Mathew said could "dramatically increase" the risk of "power being misused.” Government organizations would be exempt from the new regulations.
The bill extends the categories of persons and organizations that are prohibited from receiving foreign contributions. It also imposes more stringent penalties for violations, while failing to provide a clear mechanism for appealing government decisions, analysts say.
The Voluntary Action Network of India (VANI), a network of more than 2,000 Indian NGOs, has
described the government’s proposed move as a strategy for social control. Christians comprise less than three percent of India’s mainly Hindu population of 1.1 billion people. (With reports from India. bosnewslife.com).
