Among all the elected autocracies extant in the world, Narendra Modi’s India must rank as the most faint-hearted. Despite being securely in power for nigh on 10 years, no other regime’s nerves are quite as jumpy as the current imperium’s. Its legendary self-claimed sangfroid falls away at the merest rustle of leaves, be it a documentary screening for a dozen students, an unpublished research paper by a university don, or an arcane think tank report. Why the stoutest rulers have the faintest hearts is a historic conundrum.
It’s thus entirely in character and very predictable that the Union Home Ministry has now cancelled the Foreign Currency Regulation Act (FCRA) registration of the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), a 50-year-old think tank reputed for its non-partisan orientation and rigorous work ethic. Predictable because the guillotine has finally fallen after being poised over the think tank’s neck for well over a year.
The inexorable saga began with a ‘survey’ of CPR’s income by the Income-Tax (IT) Department, which claimed to have found unaccounted phantoms in the books. Then the Home Ministry’s FCRA cops took over last February, and also found unmentionable horrors, such as conducting activities beyond the mandated terms of formation. Now, that must have taken some doing because, as even a street corner CA will tell you, NGOs define their scope of reference in the most inclusive of terms so as to stay within the law at all times. Court papers filed by the IT authorities have it that some of CPR’s activities fall within the definition of ‘current affairs programming’.
The fencing off of current affairs programming to think tanks is an outdated and paranoiac rule from the pre-internet age that has long been rendered archaic by seamless and boundless content generation by social media companies. Policy research is essentially about contemporary concerns—it would be useless if it weren’t—so it’s a bit of an ask to expect a think tank to stay clear of current issues. Only research into ancient history might be done without encroaching on current affairs, but we know that too might stir some disquiet in this regime.
The FCRA cancellation is a death blow to CPR. Delicensing makes it illegal to receive foreign funding, on which 75% of its activities depend. A freeze of CPR’s currently held funds, imposed last year, has left it unable to pay salaries to staff, now down to a skeletal 15, or conduct any research work.
CPR is only the latest of a long line of think tanks and NGOs that have attracted FCRA action by the Modi government. In 2015, Greenpeace’s foreign funding was suspended because it apparently endangered India’s economic security. In 2021, Oxfam International and Missionaries of Charity’s FCRA licences were not renewed because of “adverse inputs”. In 2020, Amnesty International’s India bank accounts were frozen for allegedly receiving foreign funds illegally. The indie media funder Independent and Public-Spirited Media Foundation was surveyed for foreign funds, which may be a portent of a future guillotine.
There’s more to this think tank anathema than just a distaste of dissent. The source of this 360-degree distemper to adverse content—be it opinion, reportage, research, statistics, even thought—is not the garden variety paranoia of a tyrant but the deeply felt desire of an ideology-driven regime to replace all existing narratives with its own such that people have no memory of anything but the lies it spouts.