The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA) licence of the Centre for Equity Studies has been cancelled. This is yet another cruel blow to a small organisation. It is already facing an Enforcement Directorate enquiry, a probe by the Economic Offences Wing, a proposed investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation, and indirect persecution by other state agencies like the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights. Its office bearers and board members have been called multiple times by one or the other agency. They are being asked to find and submit 10 or 20 years old vouchers and papers.Suspension or cancellation of an FCRA licence means you cannot receive monetary support for the work you are doing from abroad. In an interconnected world, inequality is seen as an international challenge. International support is not meant only for extraordinary, disaster-like situations. The lives of a huge majority are already a disaster, with them not even getting two meals a day or proper compensation for their labour or displacement because the forest or the land they have been living on are now needed for corporate profit. Do street people have rights, or do those abandoned by their families and societies?These are not merely national questions. The international community is responsible for any act of inequality which in itself becomes an act of injustice anywhere in the world; it has the duty to join hands when fighting against it.Democracy is also a right. We know that only the act of voting does not achieve democracy for people. It is actually about your right to life with dignity, which means that you must feel equal in all senses. What rights we have is again not known to most of us. For example, what is the daily wage that I can insist on? Or a midday meal? Can the police enter my house without a warrant? Can land be taken by the government without consulting the people? These are not unrelated issues. One leads to the other.Also read: A Brief History of the Radically Different Nationalisms Vying To Shape the Indian RepublicIf I am working to secure the right to work or right to food and mob lynchings happen, should I turn my eyes away from it? If I am working on the issues of water and rivers are sold to corporate houses, what should I do?These are questions people working in what is known as the development sector or the field of NGOs face. What is political and what is non-political? Why does a simple act of demanding information about one’s own government become a political act? Or standing in solidarity with a Muslim or Christian subjected to majoritarian violence, political or human?There are NGOs and NGOs. There are many satisfied with building tube wells and making check dams, and there are some who ask why are rivers becoming inaccessible to the fisherfolk. There are many which plant trees and some which ask why trees are felled for mining. There are organisations which believe in ‘each one, teach one’ and others which struggle to make the right to education a reality. There are organisations which work in areas for which money is available and there are some which look for money for the work they think must be done if people are to live as human beings. Equal and with dignity.Organisations falling in the latter category live with the risk of being on the wrong side of the state. They are seen as a nuisance for the governments as they talk about rights, and mostly governments are happy with a populace without this consciousness. They are blamed for indulging in politics whereas they should have confined themselves to humanitarian work.CES is obviously one such organisation. Not content with distributing medicines to the unattended on the streets or creating night shelters for homeless, it also talks about the rights of the people to food, health and home. Not many people know about the organisation. But the man running is known widely. His name is Harsh Mander. He is known more than the other names associated with CES but all of them share one trait. They work for those who are known as underprivileged. In all senses of the word. Urban workers, working women, slum dwellers, children without homes, sickly people without medicare. Minorities facing structural violence apart from overt violence that we see everyday. Apart from such work, they also try to make governments accountable, answerable. Because people should not live on charity. They have their rights and those rights must be secured for them. Also by them. Citizenship is created in this act of securing one’s rights. And you become citizen when you join your fellow citizens in helping them get their rights.All this involves many forms of action. First, documenting the state of affairs. So, CES did conferences and seminars on the issues listed above and on other issues as well, created knowledge about those areas and then suggested ways to intervene with an objective of securing rights to people.Mander, or Anjali Bhardwaj or Amrita Johri or Navsharan Kaur, believe that they are not mere deliverers of service or carriers to the people. They want people to be regarded as right-bearing entities, and be their partners in their fight to achieve these rights.They are people who believe in the cause of justice. So it is difficult for them to sit quietly when Muslims are killed in Gujarat or put in detention centres in Assam or lynched for being Muslims. When they see a law like the Citizenship (Amendment) Act being enacted, they know that the principle of equality is violated. To accept it and then go on doing welfare work legitimises the act of depriving people of their rights, if creating two sets of people. It is this understanding which draws them out of their safe zone of service providers.Also read: Akola Police Ask Muslim Men Accused of Rioting To Furnish Hindu GuarantorsThere are thousands of NGOs and think tanks in the country which never talk in the language of rights. In the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, the government sought the help of civil society organisations – but it wanted all of them to maintain a register of those who were given even one packet of ration. There have been cases in which members of such organisations have been harassed by the police for having provided support to one particular community.CES is associated with the names of people who don’t want to be in the role of patrons of the people. They want the people to take charge of their lives. In this struggle, they stand by them.So, CES is being penalised for making people aware of their rights, and their democratic duty of securing these rights as the preamble of the constitution asks us to do. That alone makes us a people. The people at CES are friends of the people and not agents of the government.It is this which has upset the government. Why do they write articles, why do they speak? Why do they organise demonstrations? Why do they fight cases in the courts for the people wronged by the state?Before CES, organisations like the Centre for Policy Research and Oxfam have been targeted. Before them, Greenpeace and Amnesty. Organisations like Anhad have been crippled. These create knowledge about society. They can help policymakers, but they certainly help people understand their relationship with the state. They work to keep the constitutional consciousness alive in society.It is very easy for the state to turn people against these organisations and the people working in them. By creating a canard that they are amassing wealth in their name, that they are elites sustained by foreign powers. The idea of solidarity and sense of responsibility for others is alien to a society which believes in the principle of working only for self-interest. Those seen as not following this principle are suspects.The treatment of CES must not be ignored. We understand that these agency people cannot comprehend that there could be people who work without any expectation of worldly gains. But why should it be so difficult for us to say so and at least hold their hands?Apoorvanand teaches at Delhi University.