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 doesConsider 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 – the public simply knows on whose behalf you do it.There is a further distinction that matters enormously. Under FARA, the mere fact that an organisation receives international funding does not automatically require it to register, even if it engages in political activity. The law is triggered only when an entity acts at the order, request, or under the direction or control of a foreign principal.Also read: Before Amending FCRA, BJP Should Reveal Foreign Funds Received Under PM CARES, Electoral Bonds: Akhilesh YadavCongress clarified 50 years ago that receiving a bona fide subsidy, without coming under the donor’s control, does not make the organisation the donor’s agent. A hospital that accepts a foreign grant to run a clinic, and spends it as it sees fit, need not register at all.What the FCRA actually doesNow set the Indian law beside it. The FCRA does not ask you to disclose your funding. It requires you to obtain the government’s prior permission to receive it, through a registration that must be renewed and can be refused, suspended or cancelled at the discretion of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs. Without that licence, the money simply cannot come. The Act prohibits foreign funds for any activity deemed detrimental to the “national interest” – an overbroad term that has left the law open to arbitrary application. Organisations can be cut off when their work is called “political,” or against “public interest,” or “economic interest,” or “security” – none of it defined.The contrast is total. FARA says: tell us who funds you, then do as you like. The FCRA says: we will decide whether you may be funded, and we need not tell you why.The newest amendments go further than money – they regulate belief and conscience. The rules explicitly rule out religious work involving “proselytisation,” artistic work with “political or ideological content,” and awareness activities on constitutional rights unless they are “strictly non-political in nature.” Through this list, human rights advocacy, policy research, campaigning and strategic litigation are effectively excluded from foreign funding altogether. No American statute tells a church it may not teach its faith, or a research institute that its findings are too political to fund.Then there are the assets. The latest amendment empowers a designated authority to manage, transfer or dispose of assets created from foreign contributions once an organisation’s certificate is cancelled, surrendered, or simply ceases. Consider what this means. A school is built with foreign donations; the licence is later refused; the classrooms, the hostel, the chapel may then be taken over. There is no equivalent in the Western laws the government cites. FARA has never seized a newsroom. Britain’s charity law has never confiscated a mission.The world has already noticedThis is not the private grievance of affected churches. In 2016, three United Nations Special Rapporteurs jointly urged the Indian government to repeal the FCRA, warning it was being used to silence organisations whose priorities did not align with the government’s, and stating plainly that the law fails to comply with international human rights standards. That was the considered judgement of the UN’s own experts on free expression, free association, and the protection of human rights defenders.Also read: Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India Meets Amit Shah, Urges Him to Withdraw FCRA Amendment Bill, New RulesNor has time softened the verdict. In 2024 the Financial Action Task Force found India only “partially compliant” on safeguards for non-profits, warning that the FCRA risks being misused to restrict legitimate civil society, and urging that it be made risk-based and proportionate. When the latest amendments appeared this year, civil society bodies called for their immediate withdrawal – and even the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India called them dangerous, undemocratic, unconstitutional and contrary to natural justice.Why the comparison is offered at allLet me be fair to the other side, for there is a real argument here. The government points out, correctly, that tens of thousands of associations remain registered and routinely receive foreign funds for health, education and disaster relief – around 16,200 associations receiving roughly ₹23,000 crore in a single recent year, hardly, they say, the footprint of a prohibition. A state is surely entitled to know what money crosses its borders and to guard against genuine misuse. No serious person disputes that.But that is not what is in dispute. Transparency is not the issue; permission is. A law that merely required disclosure would trouble no honest organisation, and I would defend it. The FCRA does something else. It hands officials the power to decide, on case-by-case basis and without stated reason, which citizens may receive support for their work – and then, if the answer is no, to take what they have already built.That is why the comparison to FARA fails. The government invokes the West’s registration forms to justify India’s locked door. But a form you fill in and a door someone else may lock against you are not the same instrument. One assumes your freedom and asks only for honesty. The other assumes nothing, and grants what little it gives at its own pleasure.I have spent my life building schools and clinics in this country, much of it with the help of friends abroad who ask nothing except that the poor be served. We have always been willing to open our books to anyone. We are not willing to accept that our right to serve exists only so long as it pleases those in power. That is not regulation. That is a leash – and a leash, however it is described in Parliament, is not what the free democracies of the world have placed upon their people.Joseph D’Souza is archbishop of the Good Shepherd Church of India and national president of the All India Christian Council. He is International President of the Dignity Freedom Network (DFN).