NGOs under CBI lens for flouting foreign fund rule

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) will look into allegations that non-government organisations violated foreign funding rules.

The home ministry has referred two such cases to the investigating body.

A senior CBI officer said: “We have not registered any formal preliminary inquiry. There is an informal inquiry going on against the two organisations, names of which cannot be revealed at this stage.”

The cases are against two Tamil Nadu-based non-government organisations (NGOs) for alleged contravention of the provisions of Foreign Contributions Regulations Act (FCRA), 2010, said CBI sources.

The move has provoked comparisons of NGOs’ anti-nuclear movement — particularly against the Kudankulam project — with the anti-corruption campaign of Anna Hazare.

Thomas Kocherry, a 72-year-old fishworkers’ leader who has been with the movement against nuclear energy since the 80s, said “The government’s reaction (in ordering the probe) is exactly the same as the one one when it arrested Anna Hazare. Yesterday it deported a German without explaining or even establishing any guilt, and now it is ordering inquiries. Its objective is the same: crush the movement.”

The activist, who was with the anti-nuclear movement from the beginning, says the CBI inquiry are merely meant to malign the movement.

“The home ministry gets audited accounts from each NGO that gets foreign funds and if there is a diversion it is a violation for which the ministry should take action,” he said, adding that linking diversion of funds with the movement was mischievous on the part of the government.

C R Neelakanthan — a member of the people’s expert committee of the PMANE which is behind the massive people’s movement against the Kudankulam nuclear energy plant led by S P Udayakumar — said the government should have made the inquiries before making allegations.

It goes on to prove the government has been making allegations without any proof in hand, he said.

The Kudankulam nuclear power plant, which is nearing completion, has been facing popular protests for the past many months prompting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to say last week that the protests catered to agendas of foreign funding bodies based in the US. Udayakumar has denied that he has received even a penny of foreign aid.

The BJP has demanded that the Centre come out with a white paper on the issue of non-governmental organisations getting foreign funds and “working against public interest.”

P Muralidhar Rao, BJP national secretary, told reporters after attending the party’s state-level meeting in Tamil Nadu on Tuesday that the Prime Minister’s statement must be based on some authentic information.