Parliament’s Monsoon Session, which commenced on July 20 and is on till August 13, has been marked by a series of contestations on issues surfacing both within and outside Parliament. Two bills, introduced in earlier sessions of Parliament (but not tabled yet), merit greater discussion and scrutiny: the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment, or FCRA, Bill, 2026, and the Constitution (130th Amendment) Bill, 2025. Both do not just expand executive control, but also remove all space for an independent decision-maker. The two bills need to be read against a decade of precedents describing the same institutional habit: Whenever a court or a federal structure has stood between the Centre and a decision it wanted to make alone, the response has been to legislate the obstacle away.

The FCRA Bill, introduced on March 25, was framed as tidying up “legal gaps”. Internally, it does something larger by inserting a new Chapter, IIIA, into the FCRA Act, 2010, creating a Designated Authority that, under Section 16C, wields powers resembling a civil court’s in order to supervise, manage, or permanently vest in itself any foreign-funded asset — hospitals, schools, etc — the moment a registration is cancelled, surrendered, or allowed to lapse.

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The ministry that cancels a licence effectively appoints the authority that then disposes of what the organisation built, with proceeds flowing to the Consolidated Fund of India. The scale is not trivial; the government’s dashboard shows over 22,000 registrations have already been cancelled and roughly 15,000 left not renewed as of April 2026, making for a population of institutions already standing to be impacted by the mechanism now........

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