HOW TO SILENCE INCONVENIENT VOICES?

The Union Home ministry is probing 42 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) for suspected violation of norms under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), the Lok Sabha was informed recently. One can only be amazed at the obvious and brazen hypocrisy of the Narendra Modi government in going after NGOs on the issue of foreign funding after having stealthily passed a provision hidden in Finance Bill 2018 to ensure that foreign funding of political parties cannot be scrutinised for violations under the same law.

Earlier, through Finance Bill 2016, the government had amended the FCRA to make it easier for political parties to accept foreign funds, all this, in violation of the Representation of People Act, 1951, which barred political parties from receiving foreign funding. The provision to exempt political parties from scrutiny, with retrospective effect from 1976, came in the wake of a Delhi High Court order asking the government to scrutinise the accounts of the BJP and Congress for FCRA violations, and was passed amidst a din in Parliament without any debate. Among the NGOs being investigated are the Rajiv Gandhi Charitable Trust, the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society, Amnesty International (India) Foundation.

The first one doesn't bear the right name, perhaps; the CIS can prove to be inconvenient to the government, as it did when it exposed that Aadhaar data was leaking out of government departments or when it speaks up for data protection the third champions human rights and is regularly critical of the government.

There are also organisations on that list that are either innocuous or are controlled by entities seen as pro-government, such as Olympic medallist and Rajya Sabha member Mary Kom's boxing foundation, the IT industry lobby body Nasscom, the Asianet New Charitable Trust and Bharat Swabhiman Nyas. But make no mistake about which ones are the real targets. The hounding of these NGOs may not be merely the government's vindictiveness or a desire to harass them, perhaps there is some justification for ordering these probes. One can only hope that the investigation will be fair and objective. Yet, shouldn't the flow of foreign funds to political parties be under far more intense scrutiny than the flow of such funds to NGOs. After all, it is the political parties, both ruling and opposition, that determine the policies of the country, not NGOs.

The concerns over the influence of foreign funding on political parties have been articulated by both Election Commission and Law Commission reports. One cannot help but feel that the probe against NGOs is meant to silence inconvenient voices.