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Whenever the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act, 2010 is challenged, the government reaches for the same reply: every serious democracy regulates foreign money. The United States has its Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Britain, Australia and Canada have their transparency schemes. India, we are told, is merely doing what the West does, and its critics are either naïve or malicious.

The government’s own position is that the FCRA should be understood exactly as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada describe their statutes – a registration and disclosure regime for foreign-directed activity, not a permission-to-exist regime for civil society.

I want to take that sentence seriously, because it contains the whole argument – and it describes the FCRA precisely backwards. The difference between India’s law and the Western laws it invokes is not one of degree. It is the difference between a country that requires you to say who funds you and a country that decides whether you may be funded at all. Between disclosure and permission. Between a form and a locked door.

What FARA actually does

Consider the American law the government likes to cite. FARA was enacted in 1938 to require those doing political or advocacy work on behalf of foreign entities to register with the Department of Justice and disclose their relationship, activities and finances. And then the decisive point: FARA does not prohibit any specific activities; it requires only that they be registered and disclosed. It neither bars the representation of foreign interests nor prevents the spread of foreign propaganda – it provides only for public disclosure, which is seen by some as a protection of the First Amendment rights to speech and petition.

Read that again, because it is the opposite of how the FCRA works. Under the American law, sunlight is the remedy. You declare your foreign principal, you file your paperwork, and then you are free to speak, to campaign, to argue –........

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