Defunding dissent: How India’s regulatory crackdown is silencing feminist organizing
Our study involving over seventy women’s rights organisations in India revealed that between December 2022 and June 2023, the pervasive fear of shutdowns has stifled feminist uprising. Crackdown on foreign funded organisations through the FCRA has paralysed advocacy and policy work across the space generally and particularly by Dalit and Muslim women’s organisations, where domestic funding has been scarce. The long term consequences of this systemic backlash are yet to play out.
Sudarsana Kundu
Published on: 9 March 2025, 07:37 am
WE are at a critical juncture in the relationship between the citizen and the State in India. The concept of individuals as rights-bearing citizens has been overshadowed by the State’s authority in every sphere, effectively reshaping the very foundation of democracy.
Since 2014, when the Bharatiya Janata Party came into power at the centre, India has witnessed dramatic democratic backsliding that has had a direct and dire bearing on women’s rights and gender equality. Drawing on Susan Faludi’s seminal work, we characterise this as a ‘backlash’: a “powerful counterassault on women's rights”, a reactionary force that systematically erodes and reverses the hard-fought gains of the feminist movement.
Our research is situated within a broader global initiative, "Countering Backlash: Reclaiming Gender Justice," coordinated by the Institute of Development Studies, which seeks to understand and respond to these challenges across multiple countries.
This erosion of civil society autonomy and its freedom of expression is being accomplished in a variety of ways in India. An increasingly popular tool used by government actors to restrict the autonomy and functioning of civil society organisations (CSOs) in India is the use of funding laws and related regulations.
An increasingly popular tool used by government actors to restrict the autonomy and functioning of civil society organisations (CSOs) in India is the use of funding laws and related regulations.
The FCRA clampdown
The issue of foreign funding has been fraught from the early years of independent India, and the law has been used frequently to target non-governmental organisations (NGOs) by restricting their access to overseas funding. Over the years, the law has undergone multiple amendments, with significant revisions introduced in 2010 and 2020, which have led CSOs to contend that the government is weaponising the FCRA to suppress dissent. The massive clampdown has resulted in 6677 NGOs losing their FCRA licenses between 2017 and 2021.
The use of the law “selectively to silence critical voices” has been a particular hallmark of the current government and has been raised as a concern by multiple United Nations representatives, who maintained that the FCRA “do not meet the obligations of the Union of India under international law”, and has had a “detrimental impact on the right to freedom of association and expression of human rights NGOs”, and called on the government to repeal the law. The 2020 Amendment has indeed tightened the noose around NGOs, especially those seeking accountability from the government on behalf of marginalised communities.
Between December 2022 and June 2023, our research, based on focus group discussions with approximately 74 feminist organizations across India, revealed that the pervasive fear of shutdowns has severely impacted feminist organizing. This has led to the loss of international funding sources and posed an existential threat to women’s rights organizations (WROs), which have always contended with resource precarity within Indian civil society.
