Indians will suffer: Shashi Tharoor slams Centre on Foreign Funding law

Mangalore Today News Network

New Delhi, Aug 6, 2026: Congress MP Shashi Tharoor has slammed the proposed amendment to the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2026, which the government is planning to introduce in Parliament next week.

Calling it a "dangerous escalation in the centralisation of executive power", Tharoor has said that the proposed legislation "fundamentally rewrites the relationship between the Indian state and civil society".

In a strongly worded column in The Indian Express, the MP from Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram has attacked the government for being "driven by its majoritarian ideology and allergy to independent voices".

"The current government has increasingly reframed non-profit charities, think tanks and human rights groups not as development partners, but as sources of subversion and foreign manipulation. To neutralise these voices, the state has targeted their primary vulnerability: dependence on international philanthropy," Tharoor has written.

The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2026 seeks to empower the government to create a "Designated Authority" to take over the management of foreign contributions and assets created using foreign contributions when an organisation’s FCRA registration is cancelled, surrendered, or ceases because it is not renewed.

The bill also states that in the case of assets that are a place of worship, the Authority must ensure that its religious character is maintained.

"Through aggressive enforcement and sweeping amendments to the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), the government has already imposed complex compliance burdens, such as banning sub-granting to grassroots organisations, slashing allowable administrative outlays, and mandating a single bank branch in New Delhi for all foreign inflows," Tharoor has said, adding that the regulation has "triggered an 87 per cent drop in foreign funding, forcing thousands of secular and community-based organisations to shut down."

"The contributions of the Church and affiliated charitable organisations in India are documented in millions of lives uplifted, educated, and healed"

The Thiruvananthapuram MP expressed concern that further changes to the law to allow seizure of assets by the state "threaten to permanently cripple the sector".

"The Amendment introduces an unprecedented mechanism of control that bypasses traditional legal protections," Tharoor stated.

Drawing from his experience in Kerala, Tharoor pointed out that Christian-run charitable trusts have done good work in the health and education sectors for over a century, and the amendment to the FCRA law threatens to "destabilise" these institutions.

"As a Kerala MP, I have seen Christian-run charitable trusts, schools, hospitals and diagnostic centres, medical colleges, and welfare NGOs serving marginalised populations, regardless of caste or creed, for well over a century. These facilities rely on a mix of local contributions, domestic fees, and foreign grants to maintain world-class medical equipment, sponsor affordable care, and fund educational scholarships," Tharoor said.

He also warned that the provision in the new law that allows the state to take over assets will be harmful to the interests of people benefiting from these institutions.

"By linking an administrative decision on an FCRA licence directly to the physical confiscation of land and buildings, the Bill creates an environment of extreme instability. A single administrative delay or an adverse ruling by the Ministry of Home Affairs could instantaneously convert a functioning 500-bed charitable hospital into state property, disrupting essential public services and placing community assets under government control. The victims are the ordinary Indians who are the beneficiaries of these facilities."

Warning that subjecting charitable institutions to "punitive statutory mechanisms" is a profound injustice, Tharoor pointed out that the services of Christian organisations are "documented in the millions of lives who benefited".

"It is a profound injustice to subject institutions that have devoted generations to India’s development, education, and healthcare to such punitive statutory mechanisms. The contributions of the Church and affiliated charitable organisations in India are documented in millions of lives uplifted, educated, and healed," Tharoor stated.

Terming the bill anti-democratic, Tharoor has urged the Opposition to unite and resist it in the House.

As per the Ministry of Home Affairs, 13,520 organisations received Rs 55,741 crore of foreign contribution between 2019 and 2022. The FCRA portal indicates that, as of July 15, 2026, there are 14,449 active FCRA certificates, 22,498 cancelled, and 15,212 deemed as expired.