A Revolution of Rules: The Regulatory Reform of India’s Nonprofit Sector

What is it about nonprofits that inspires so many to passionately support their agendas and others to adamantly seek their control? In India, laws regulating the nonprofit sector were dramatically reformed between 2010-2020, reconfiguring relationships between corporations, nonprofits, and the government. Thousands of nonprofits, including powerful NGOs, lost their ability to receive foreign funding, and in 2015 dozens more were put on a state-sponsored watch list. While many assume that nonprofits are defined by the causes they champion, A Revolution of Rules demonstrates that the nonprofit form is shaped primarily through its regulation, in a dynamic process of democratic and political negotiation.

Erica Bornstein argues that the scrutiny of nonprofits in India must be understood in a wider, global context of political judicialization and regulatory reform. She examines how members of nonprofit organizations are the unsung heroes of democracy as they navigate a shrinking stage for rights-based work and struggle to protect civil society. The protagonists featured in this book include nonprofit workers, lawyers, accountants, philanthropists, and civil servants who conduct their work on the sidelines--at workshops, in modest offices, through report-writing and petitions. To understand nonprofits and their relationship to democracy in the world, Bornstein asserts, one must look to the deceptively unassuming sites of struggle over the nonprofit form and its regulation.

Erica Bornstein is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Disquieting Gifts: Humanitarianism in New Delhi (Stanford, 2012).