By Binod Anand Secretary General, Confederation of NGOs of Rural India (CNRI)

A nation is not defended only at its borders. In our century it is also defended — or quietly lost — somewhere far less visible: in what an ordinary citizen believes about her government, her neighbour, her own worth, and the future of her country. There are no tanks on that frontier and no line on any map. There is only a screen, a feed, and a steady drip of engineered emotion. This is the terrain of what strategists call Fourth-Generation Warfare, and its weapon is not force. Its weapon is manipulation.

The old wars sought to occupy territory. This one seeks to occupy perception. Its logic is disarmingly simple: control the narrative, and you need not conquer a nation by force — you can persuade it to divide itself. The casualties are not counted in the usual way. They are trust, cohesion, and a people’s confidence in their own institutions and in one another.

I want to be careful here, because this is easily misunderstood. None of this describes ordinary political disagreement, which is the very lifeblood of a democracy and must always be protected. It describes something narrower and more deliberate — organised, often externally directed efforts to manufacture distrust, inflame division, and wear down a society’s belief in itself. In our field experience at CNRI, this manipulation travels along five recurring channels: disinformation dressed as news; the exploitation of caste, religion and regional fault-lines; sustained psychological pressure on public morale; economic coercion over markets and resources; and the use of proxies to fight another party’s battles while the principal stays out of sight.

Why the village is the front line

It is tempting to imagine all this happening in newsrooms and metros. In truth, the most exposed frontier is rural India. It is where the largest number of new citizens are coming online, often with little exposure to how information is engineered upstream. It is where land, agriculture and cooperative institutions concentrate real economic value, and therefore real strategic interest. And it is where a manufactured grievance, dropped into a genuine hardship, can be made to look like the community’s own authentic voice.

Let me say plainly what this is not. It is not that our rural citizens are gullible. It is that they are targeted — and that the machinery of targeting is invisible to them. Resilience, then, must begin by making that machinery visible.

Follow the money

Of those five channels, two — economic coercion and proxy influence — turn directly on money. And influence that must remain deniable needs a channel that stays out of sight. Funding meant to shape a nation’s policy debates, its elections, or its public mood is most effective precisely when no one can see who is paying for it, or why.

This is the hinge of the whole argument, so let me state it as clearly as I can. If foreign funding intended to influence our domestic public life remains invisible, then no citizen, no journalist, and no Parliament can hold anyone accountable for it. Disclosure is therefore not a threat to accountability. It is its precondition.

Which brings us to a law that is far more argued-about than understood: the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act.

What FCRA actually is

Read the critics and you would think FCRA bars Indians from receiving help from abroad. It does not. It requires that such help be registered, received through a single verifiable banking channel, and disclosed — the amount, the donor, and the purpose. That is all. The regime does not ask civil society to justify its existence; it asks it to be transparent about its foreign money.

The numbers settle the question of whether this is a “ban.” In 2024–25, roughly 16,200 actively registered organisations lawfully received about ₹22,963 crore in foreign contributions for schools, hospitals, disaster relief, research and rural welfare. That is not the fingerprint of a prohibition. It is the fingerprint of a functioning disclosure system — one in which good work continues, only in the light.

I hold no illusion that this ends the debate, and I would not want it to. There is a genuine, worthwhile conversation to be had about civic space, about administrative delays, about the burden compliance places on small honest organisations. CNRI lives that burden alongside the sector. But the honest response to a difficult conversation is to have it on the facts — and the central fact is that transparency and a thriving voluntary sector are not enemies. They are allies. The voluntary sector’s standing rests entirely on public confidence, and public confidence rests on the visibility of who funds it. A transparency regime is the sector’s friend: it separates the many organisations doing genuine work from the few channels that merely borrow the language of civil society for other ends.

The line I keep returning to is this: the answer to opaque money is disclosure, not the shutting-down of civil society — accountability, not amputation. A confident democracy keeps its civic space open precisely by keeping it transparent.

India is not the outlier

There is a comforting myth that India stands alone in regulating foreign-funded influence. The opposite is true. The United States built the model in 1938 with its Foreign Agents Registration Act — and in 2025 directed its agencies to enforce it more strictly, not less. Australia legislated in 2018, the United Kingdom’s foreign-influence scheme came into force only in July 2025, and Canada created its registry in 2024. The European Union is drafting its own directive now, after a survey in which 81 per cent of Europeans called covert foreign interference a serious problem.

The pattern across every one of these democracies is identical: where foreign money is intended to influence domestic affairs, registration and disclosure are required; a public record is kept; and non-compliance carries penalties. The more useful question is therefore not “why is India regulating foreign funding?” but “why are the world’s democracies steadily doing the same — and how does our framework compare?” On the evidence, it compares closely, and it has done so since 1976.

Sunlight is our defence

At CNRI, our response to all this is a mission we call Civil Society Resilience and National Awareness — CSRNAM. It is not about fear, and it is emphatically not about suspicion of any community or faith. It is about a civic reflex we can teach and strengthen at the last mile: to recognise how manipulation is engineered, to see the method and the money behind a message, and to refuse to let ordinary difference be weaponised into hostility.

Two principles govern everything we do, and I offer them here as the whole of the matter distilled. Help people think — never tell them what to think. Suspect the technique — never the person. A mission that broke either rule would become the very thing it opposes.

Transparency in foreign funding is not an obstacle to good work. It is the ground on which trust in good work is built. In an age when the weapon is manipulation, sunlight is a shield — and an informed, confident, united people is the surest defence any democracy can raise.

Awareness is our defence. Unity is our strength.

The author is Secretary General of the Confederation of NGOs of Rural India (CNRI), which holds Special Consultative Status with the United Nations ECOSOC, and Founder of the World Cooperative Economic Forum (WCOOPEF). Views are personal.