Harish Salve's FCRA Argument: Sovereignty in the Language of Accountants

Harish Salve, King's Counsel and former Solicitor General of India, told Republic Media Network's Editor-in-Chief Arnab Goswami that India's political class has been arguing about the wrong thing. The Foreign Contribution Regulation Amendment Bill 2026 has been debated largely as a religious question, specifically about churches and proselytisation. Salve's contention, stated without diplomatic cushioning, is that this frame is both inaccurate and strategically costly. The law is about money. It has always been about money. The moment India allows the conversation to drift toward theology, it loses the argument at home and abroad.

"No donation comes free," Salve told Goswami. Every sovereign state guards the movement of capital across its borders. The question India must answer is not whether foreign money should enter at all, but what purpose it serves once it lands, who controls it, and whether its trail is legible to any regulator.

The Narrative Problem

Salve situated the FCRA controversy within a pattern he has watched repeat itself in Indian public life. He cited the farm laws and the Citizenship Amendment Act as earlier examples where opposition was constructed on slogans rather than statutory text. He told Goswami that it had become "fashionable in India not to have a debate now," and that "detail is missing in the debate in India on the FCRA Bill." Social media and one-liners have replaced serious reading of legislative intent.

The FCRA's critics, domestically and internationally, have been effective because they have operated in the register of values: religious freedom, civil society space, dissent. Salve's move is to drag the argument back into the register of finance law, where India's position is stronger. A transparency requirement applied uniformly to all foreign-funded entities, regardless of their ideological character, is harder to attack in a UN forum than a law that can be made to look targeted at particular communities or political tendencies.

Beyond the Church Debate

Salve acknowledged the numbers that have dominated public discussion. According to him, roughly Rs 2,300 crore of the approximately Rs 23,000–24,000 crore received in foreign contributions last year went to churches, a significant sum, but representing about ten percent of the total inflow. Fixing the entire debate on that slice misrepresents both the law's scope and the risk it is designed to manage.

The real exposure, in his assessment, lies elsewhere: NGOs that are not engaged in social work but can be, as he put it, "weaponized to fight corporate battles, weaponized against Indian industry, and weaponized against India's domestic growth." He cited the Nicobar development project, valued between $11 billion and $20 billion, as an example of a strategic initiative that organised foreign funding could obstruct. That is not a hypothetical; it is a pattern documented in other large democracies, including the United States, where the Foreign Agents Registration Act has been used against precisely this kind of indirect lobbying infrastructure.

Foreign capital entering an NGO does not stay in a sealed compartment marked "social work." It flows into legal fees, media placements, protest logistics, regulatory interventions. If that flow is opaque, the state cannot distinguish between a genuine development organisation and what is functionally a foreign-funded pressure group operating under charitable cover.

The Drafting Trap

Salve's framing points toward the law's most serious structural vulnerability, one the government cannot afford to ignore as it finalises the Amendment Bill.

A transparency-first principle is sound in theory. In practice, the FCRA's enforcement history has made it difficult to sustain that characterisation. Over 20,000 licences have been cancelled since 2015, including organisations like Oxfam India and Amnesty International India. The Ministry of Home Affairs has consistently framed these cancellations as compliance failures, not ideological targeting. That framing is defensible when individual cases are examined on their merits. It becomes harder to defend when the pattern of cancellations correlates with civil society activity that the government finds inconvenient, a concern that constitutional scholars have raised regarding the law's prior-permission and sub-granting restrictions, which effectively restrict funding flows even to technically compliant organisations.

Adversarial states that fund narrative operations targeting India benefit from precisely this ambiguity. When India's FCRA enforcement looks selective, those states can conflate legitimate sovereignty-protecting regulation with suppression of dissent. The tighter the law's drafting, the more transparent its compliance criteria, the less useful that instrument becomes. India's strategic interest is a court-proof FCRA that isolates genuinely subversive foreign funding while giving any reasonable observer, including a UN Special Rapporteur, nothing credible to stand on.

The International Legal Battlefield

Salve's stature matters in ways that go beyond domestic credibility. He has argued before international tribunals and is known in the chambers where India's legal reputation is built or eroded. When a jurist of his standing says publicly that the law's legitimacy rests on financial transparency as a singular principle, not on religious identity, not on political alignment, not on which foreign governments fund which organisations, he is writing India a brief it can use in international forums.

Observer Research Foundation analysts have argued that India's FCRA framework is broadly comparable to the Foreign Agents Registration Act in the United States and similar regimes in Australia and Germany, and that international criticism reflects a double standard more than a genuine rule-of-law concern. That argument is correct as far as it goes. But comparability with FARA is a floor, not a ceiling. The stronger position for India is to exceed the transparency standard set by those comparators, to make the compliance architecture so legible and so uniformly applied that the comparison itself becomes unnecessary.

Salve's intervention is an invitation to the government to exceed rather than match existing standards. He is not arguing against the FCRA or against tighter scrutiny. He is arguing for a version that is legally durable: one resting on auditable financial transparency rather than on the identity of the funder or the ideological character of the recipient. If the Amendment Bill 2026 is drafted to reflect that principle explicitly, with objective compliance criteria, clear audit trails, and a proportionate response mechanism, it becomes something India can defend in any court, domestic or international.

The political temptation in any high-stakes legislative moment is to draft broadly and enforce selectively. That temptation is understandable, and it is also the route to a law that collapses under judicial scrutiny or hands adversaries the narrative gift Salve is warning against. The FCRA's next iteration will be judged not by how many licences it cancels, but by whether the cancellations hold up, in the Supreme Court, in international forums, and in the assessment of the countries India wants as long-term partners. Salve has given the government the legal grammar for a law that does. Whether the legislative drafters use it is a different question entirely.