Express View on crackdown on NGOs: The long arm of IT department

The Income Tax department’s crackdown connected 5 NGOs — including 1 of the country’s astir respected nationalist argumentation deliberation tanks, the Centre for Policy Research — reeks of disquieting overreach. It is simply a heavy-handed bid to shrink spaces for escaped look and civilian nine enactment successful a democracy. As a study successful this insubstantial has shown, the “intimation letters” issued to the NGOs are escaped and voluminous, straying acold beyond the I-T department’s remit. On the 1 hand, they question to weaponise the regularisation book’s good people against the targeted NGOs. And, connected the other, they indulge successful free-style spectre-painting and broad-brush conspiracy-mongering. There are respective pointed references to “foreign funding”, unsubstantiated allegations that it was being “misused” for, astatine the precise least, “activities contrary to the objects for which they (the NGOs) were formed”, and, successful fact, to fulfil agendas that question to stall this country’s “economic improvement projects”. The I-T section does not conscionable spell beyond its mandate of assessing and collecting taxes by arrogating to itself the onerous work of safeguarding “national interest” from NGOs allegedly bent connected hurting it. It besides sees inter-connections and linkages of processes and unit betwixt these abstracted entities wherever nary exist, and tries to overgarment successful sinister hues those that do.

Several concerns are sparked by the I-T department’s bid to compression the surviving spaces of these NGOs, by surveys, summons and bulky notices. In tandem with a frost connected inflow of overseas funds done suspension of their FCRA registration, it is simply a two-pronged onslaught that is designed to wound, if not to kill. To statesman with, the indiscriminate sighting and demonisation of the “foreign hand” is strikingly outdated and ill-fitting successful a state that celebrates overseas nonstop concern successful different sectors and congratulates itself for seizing its opportunities successful an progressively interconnected planetary economy. There is besides a larger distrust astatine enactment present that is adjacent much disturbing. The ruling constitution astatine the Centre, present successful its 3rd term, has been visibly sick astatine easiness with civilian nine actors. Be it deliberation tanks and probe institutions and universities, oregon protests and agitations geared towards a circumstantial governance origin oregon argumentation goal, the onus has been connected them to beryllium their innocence. They person been called upon to execute their allegiance to a “national interest” defined by the powers-that-be. This changeless baiting by the authorities of non-governmental organisations and institutions that are autonomous and extracurricular its nonstop control, its insecure and restrictive presumption of their morganatic activities, is taking a toll. After all, a deliberative ideology thrives connected ideas and innovation, it needs escaped and unfastened spaces to dispersed and grow.