On Wednesday afternoon, in a Lok Sabha thick with protest, a minister of state rose and moved that the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2026 be referred to a joint committee of both Houses. Thirty-one members. Twenty-one from the Lok Sabha, nominated by the speaker. Ten from the Rajya Sabha, nominated by the chairman. The report is due by the last day of the first week of the winter session.The home minister, whose ministry drafted the Bill, was not in the House to move his own motion. K.C. Venugopal asked where he was. Kiren Rijiju told the opposition it should welcome the referral, and said there was not a single provision in the Bill that targets minorities.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.I welcome the referral. I want to be precise about what I am welcoming. I have watched this procedure before and I know what it can be made to do.Two years ago the Waqf (Amendment) Bill went to a joint committee of exactly this size. That committee worked. It sat for more than 125 hours, travelled to ten cities and took in close to a crore of memoranda from the public. That is a volume of civic participation which ought to have settled the matter.It adopted its report by 15 votes to 11. Every opposition amendment was defeated on party lines. The dissent notes of the minority members were redacted, and a corrigendum restoring parts of them was tabled only after those members protested in public. The government could then say, accurately, that the Bill had been scrutinised. It had been. And it changed nothing the government did not want changed.This is the design of the thing. Proportional nomination means a joint committee reproduces the majority that made it. So this committee will sit, and travel and hear, and read our memoranda. What I want to know is whether it will go near the clause that matters.Let me put my fear in a form that can be checked against the record in December.I expect the committee to improve the Bill’s drafting. It will tighten definitions. It may add a hearing before cancellation, a time limit, an appeal to a tribunal – and each of these will be reported as a concession won.But I do not expect it to disturb the principle that the assets of a charitable body may vest in the state when its registration ends. I do not expect it to touch section 15 of the principal Act of 2010, where that principle begins.Section 15 already provides that where a certificate is cancelled or surrendered, the foreign contribution and the assets created from it vest in a prescribed authority, to be returned if the body registers again. The 2026 Bill takes that provision and enlarges it. It replaces the section with a new chapter and a designated authority. Vesting now reaches past cancellation and surrender to cessation and to simple non-renewal, and it becomes permanent where renewal is not obtained. The route to a court is narrowed.Also read: ‘Targeting Minorities While RSS Gets Foreign Funds’: Opposition as FCRA Bill Sent to JPCAn organisation whose certificate is cancelled can go to the high court. An organisation whose renewal application is simply not processed has no comparable remedy, and under this Bill it could lose the title to its school buildings, its hospital wards and its children’s homes without ever having been heard by anybody. A delay on a government portal becomes a transfer of property.The home ministry’s own dashboard records more than 22,000 cancellations and 15,000 registrations that expired and were never renewed. Those 15,000 are the ones to watch. Under the present law they are merely defunct. Under the new chapter they become candidates for expropriation.Beneath all of it sits a premise that ought to be said out loud. Property becomes forfeitable according to the nationality of the money that built it. A school built by Indian donations is a school. A school built by a congregation in Stuttgart or Seoul that gave for 40 years to educate children they would never meet is, on this reasoning, something the state may one day take. Nobody in the government has defended that in those words. It is what the Bill enacts.So we will go to this committee. We will file our memoranda and we will appear when we are called. But we are entitled to say in advance what a good-faith committee would look like, so that the country can judge for itself in December.It would take section 15 of the principal Act inside its remit and not the amendment alone. It would call the institutions whose properties are at stake, not only the ministries that drafted the clauses. It would publish the memoranda it receives, and publish any dissent uncut, the first time. It would ask the home ministry on the record for a list of every body whose renewal has lapsed and what becomes of its assets under the new chapter. And it would report on the principle and not only the procedure: whether a democratic state should ever acquire a charity’s buildings without a court.If the committee does these things I will say so, publicly and gladly, and I will have been wrong to worry.A committee is a room. A room does not make what happens inside it honest. That depends on who walks in, and on whether the country is watching when they do. Our side of this is settled. Our books are open, our returns are filed and we can account for every rupee. We ask what any citizen may ask of parliament: that our schools and our hospitals not be taken from us by an administrative silence.We will pray for these 31 members. We will also count their votes.Archbishop Joseph D’Souza is president of the All India Christian Council and archbishop of the Anglican Good Shepherd Church of India.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. 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