Last week, amid the roar of young voices asking for accountability, amid the courage of their songs and the humour of their memes, there was the usual absence of support from government officials and business leaders. But this time there was also an eerie silence from an extremely important segment of the country: the nonprofits.
Some of us in the team spent the week on social media scouring the handles of nonprofits, especially those who work with the youth, to find out what they were doing for the people they serve.
And we could count on half a hand the number of organisations who had put out even a single post, story, or tweet supporting the protests, leave alone providing tools and advice to the youth who were standing up to a powerful government.
We—who do not hesitate to ask the world of everyone, who berate governments, businesses, philanthropists, and patriarchal communities for not doing enough—were nowhere in the picture. We, who claim to be the drivers of social change, did not even show up. Every time our youth stepped out, putting their future, their lives, their livelihoods at stake, we retreated. We stayed silent, telling ourselves that we’re doing it ‘for the greater good’.
It’s a double standard.
We ask our funders to be brave. We ask them to support our activism and advocacy efforts. We ask them to fund work on human rights, social justice, legal reform, and independent media. We ask them to ignore the risks to their businesses when they do so, to own their power and support those who have none. We chide them when they play safe.
We ask the young people we work with, and their families, to be brave. We tell the young girls in our programmes to fight for their right to go to college, to migrate for jobs, to not get married early, to delay pregnancy. We ask their mothers to take on their families and report violence, have fewer children, and ignore social norms.
We are quick to demand that others step up, that others show courage, that others fight entrenched systems that could break them and take their lives. And yet, what are we doing?
We have been anything but brave. In the past week, we’ve had so many leaders from large, mostly urban nonprofits tell us that they cannot say anything because their FCRA licenses will be revoked; because their funders will pull out; because if they are shut down, thousands of people will lose their jobs, their programmes will end, and the young people they serve will have no one to help them.
There are so many assumptions in these statements—that communities need nonprofits at all costs, at all times. That if one organisation didn’t exist, they wouldn’t be able to fight the fight or have the agency to improve their lives.
And while we have all seen organisations being targeted for saying and doing things that the people in power didn’t agree with, we knew this when we walked into this sector, didn’t we?
We knew that when we asked our communities to do things they had never done before, we would need to show equal courage and stand up for them when the time came. We knew that these are the risks of doing business as a civil society organisation in an authoritarian environment. Why then aren’t we keeping our end of the bargain?
Imagine if we were brave.
What would really happen if even a few of us stood up? In public forums. For the people our programmes claim to benefit: the youth, the farmers, the women, the minorities.
Maybe we would then learn how to stand up for ourselves when the government comes after us and tightens the norms around FCRA and 12A and 80G licenses. Maybe we wouldn’t bemoan the state of the sector in private WhatsApp groups and behind closed doors. Maybe, instead, we would write editorials calling out the injustice, march with those seeking change, and develop a voice that is loud and clear.
Yes, there is the risk of losing our license to operate, and therefore everything we’ve worked so hard for as individual organisations and leaders. And the people we serve might feel bereft for a while. But if a few nonprofits shut down because they dared, others can and will take their place.
The minute we stop thinking that we are the only ones who can do the work we do, we will learn to embrace the idea of failure—that our programmes will shut down, that we will no longer be EDs and founders of ‘successful’ nonprofits, that jobs will be lost. And when we do that, we will automatically become braver and be willing to fight for ourselves and our people.
More importantly, the next time we ask our communities to go beyond their lived realities, we can tell them where we were when young people put their lives at risk at Jantar Mantar, when women at Ken–Betwa immersed themselves in the rivers, and when communities hugged trees at Rishikesh. And maybe we will earn their trust because along with our good intentions will be the solidarity we showed.
For years now, we have fretted about how the sector doesn’t have a voice; how we do not have a seat at any table; how hard it is to drive change. It’s time to also look inward and see why that is the case.
Because if we are to stay relevant in our country, we will need to be at least half as brave as our fellow citizens. Otherwise, we might as well watch ourselves become tools in the hands of the powers that be.
