Christian ministries in India threatened by new bill; religious freedom advocates speak out
A bill advancing through India’s Parliament would tighten restrictions on foreign funding for faith-based organizations, including media outlets, food ministries, schools, clinics, hospitals and churches serving Christian communities. Religious freedom advocates are pressing lawmakers to reject it.
The bill, known as the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill 2026, went before the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s Parliament, in March. The chamber can pass changes to the funding law without the upper house’s approval. The Washington-based Religious Freedom Institute is urging lawmakers to oppose the bill now that Parliament’s “Monsoon Session” is under way.
The bill would set up a designated authority, giving India’s Ministry of Home Affairs power to seize and control the assets of any non-governmental organization, or NGO, whenever its registration is canceled, expires, or is held up by paperwork delays. The ministry could then sell the seized assets and keep the proceeds permanently, and it could impose these penalties without a judicial proceeding or review.
The underlying statute, the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA), dates to 1976 and requires groups that receive money from abroad to register with India’s Ministry of Home Affairs. It has been amended several times since then, each time adding new restrictions, the institute said.
India’s Minister of State for Home Affairs Nityanand Rai told the Lok Sabha that the bill’s main purpose is stopping faith-based NGOs from misusing foreign funds to promote religious conversions.
Religious Freedom Institute President David Trimble said promoting one’s own faith teaching is itself part of religious freedom, and that an accusation of conversion alone is now enough for a group to lose its FCRA license.
Trimble said groups that depend on donations from the United States and other countries would have their existence put at risk, which he said breaks India’s constitutional guarantee of “free profession, practice and propagation of religion.”
About 16,000 NGOs held active FCRA licenses as of April 2024, while just under 21,000 others had already had theirs canceled by that point, the institute reported.
The number of NGOs with active licenses has since fallen below 14,500, the count of those canceled has climbed above 22,000, and the Ministry of Home Affairs has listed more than 15,000 more as “ceased.”
In an opinion piece for RealClearPolitics, Trimble put the canceled figure above 22,500 and said the government had deemed 15,100 more licenses “expired.”
Since 2020, Compassion International and World Vision India have each lost some or all of their ability to operate there, along with two Catholic-affiliated groups, Church’s Auxiliary for Social Action and Tamil Nadu Social Service Society, the institute said.
Trimble cited a 2021 report, which he said was produced for a project focused on the rights of faith-based groups, stating that religious institutions “act in society and can be acted upon” and are “inescapably visible and public in nature.”
He wrote that the bill would also restrict donors outside India who support these ministries through their own faith, and could weaken trust-based ties between the two countries.
Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., pressed Secretary of State Marco Rubio ahead of his trip to India in May to push Indian officials to withdraw the amendment.
Smith said better U.S.-India relations must include letting faith-based groups work in the country “without having their assets nationalized.”
"The effect is that, for an error in a single transaction, the entire property of a church, including equipment, land, schools, hospitals, and bank funds, could vest immediately in a government-designated authority, which could then manage, sell, or otherwise dispose of them at will," Smith wrote. "Worse, the bill’s 'vesting' provisions apply if even a small portion of an asset was financed with foreign contributions — meaning, for example, that the entire assets of a diocese, owning perhaps hundreds of churches, could be seized for an error in processing a single small foreign donation."
Religious freedom in India did not come up in headlines from that visit, though Trimble said Rubio’s record as a defender of the right made it likely he raised the issue.
Trimble noted that Rubio’s opening stop in India was the Missionaries of Charity’s headquarters, an order founded by St. Mother Teresa, along with its orphanage, Nirmala Sishu Bhawan, which he called a possible rebuke of the bill.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has pushed for India to be named a Country of Particular Concern, a designation reserved for governments that have “engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom,” but successive administrations have declined to apply it, Trimble wrote.
The institute warned that if lawmakers pass the amendment, it would strengthen the case for placing India on the CPC list and give U.S. policymakers additional diplomatic tools to use.
