The State and the Sanctuary

India's FCRA Bill and the Question of Who Owns Christian Institutions

I was recently sent a text message from a friend, passing on a prayer request from a Christian leader in India. It asked simply for prayer that a piece of legislation, due for a vote within days, would not pass. I had to look up what the legislation actually was.

My writing stays close to home most of the time, tracing how the institutions Christians built in Australia, our schools, our hospitals, our welfare agencies, are slowly reshaped by compliance regimes and funding dependency rather than by any single dramatic law. But once I understood what this bill does, I could not file it away as someone else's story. It raises the same underlying question, playing out in a more direct form, in a Parliament that may decide it within days.

Start with World Vision India. For close to seventy years it ran children's and family programs across the country, registered to receive foreign contributions since 1986. In November 2022 the government suspended that registration; by January 2024 it was cancelled outright. World Vision's own statement afterward did not argue the legal merits. It said the organisation was “heartbroken for the vulnerable children and families” it had served for more than half a century, and that it remained concerned for the staff who had stayed through the uncertainty.

I looked harder at what “compliance finding” actually meant here before writing that sentence, because it deserved more than a shrug. The Ministry's cancellation order was never made public in detail. When a Catholic news service asked World Vision India's Chennai office for specifics, officials declined to say more; the Ministry did not publicly disclose detailed reasons for the cancellation or its precise date.

What is on the record, in World Vision India's own audited financial statement filed with the Ministry in October 2023, is that the allegations covered eight years, 2012–13 to 2020–21, and that the organisation stated it had answered every matter the Ministry raised and supplied the supporting documentation for each one.

Public reporting also records a 2019 complaint by the Hyderabad-based Legal Rights Protection Forum, an activist group with a documented pattern of filing FCRA complaints against Christian missionary organisations, concerning approximately ₹28,000 received from New Zealand and recorded for a religious rather than humanitarian purpose.

I could not establish whether that complaint played any part in the Ministry's eventual cancellation decision, or whether it was simply one of several matters raised over the years. Unlike the Centre for Policy Research, which challenged its own cancellation in the Delhi High Court and lost, I found no record of World Vision India litigating its case at all.

That is the honest state of the public record: a government that gave no detailed public reasons, an organisation that says it answered every question put to it, and no independent tribunal that has actually weighed the two accounts against each other. I am not in a position to resolve that from Australia. I am in a position to say that a system capable of cancelling a seventy-year-old children's charity without ever publishing its reasons is exactly the kind of system about to be handed considerably more power over what happens next.

It is worth being clear about what is actually new here. The idea that foreign-funded assets may vest in an authority when registration is cancelled is not itself novel; Section 15 of the existing FCRA has provided for that since 2010, as PRS Legislative Research sets out in detail.

What the 2026 bill proposes is a considerably more developed statutory machinery built on that existing power: it extends vesting to registrations that cease through non-renewal or simple expiry, not only cancellation or surrender, creates the Designated Authority regime to administer it, and gives that Authority express powers to manage, transfer and ultimately dispose of the assets involved.

The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2026, was introduced in India's Lok Sabha on 25 March 2026. According to PRS's own bill summary, the bill creates a “Designated Authority” empowered to take over, manage and dispose of the foreign-funded assets of any organisation whose FCRA registration is cancelled, surrendered, or simply allowed to lapse.

Cessation is automatic under a new Section 14B: no renewal filed in time, an application refused, or the five-year certificate simply expires. Assets vest provisionally at first, and permanently if registration is not restored within a prescribed window, at which point the Authority may transfer them to a government department or sell them, with proceeds credited to India's Consolidated Fund.

Even assets built only partly with foreign money are captured; an organisation can apply to have the domestically funded portion returned, though PRS notes this is often impossible in practice, a hospital ward raised with blended funding cannot usually be divided that way at all. By PRS's count, roughly 14,400 FCRA certificates were active in mid-2026, against more than 37,000 already cancelled or lapsed.

It is worth being precise about what is actually at stake: not every Catholic school or hospital in India, but specifically assets built wholly or partly with foreign contributions and tied to an FCRA registration. Within that scope, one protection is written into the bill by name: where a vested asset is a place of worship, the Ministry of Home Affairs has clarified that the Designated Authority must maintain its religious character “under all circumstances.”

I want to state that plainly, because it is a real safeguard and the piece is stronger for not pretending otherwise. But it is also a narrow one. The Catholic Bishops' Conference of India made exactly this point in two memoranda sent to Home Minister Amit Shah and to every Member of Parliament on 31 March 2026, over the signature of Secretary General Archbishop Anil J.T. Couto.

The sanctuary is protected. The hospital next to it, the school across the road, the orphanage down the lane, are not. CBCI invoked Article 300A of India's Constitution, the right to property, arguing that vesting assets without prior judicial determination violates due process, and Articles 25 and 26, religious freedom and denominational autonomy, arguing that limiting protection to places of worship leaves the Church's actual social mission exposed.

Is that overstated? I went looking for the government's strongest answer, and found one worth including. The bill does provide a right of appeal, an administrative revision and then a judicial appeal to a District Judge, against how the Designated Authority handles assets once they have vested. That is a genuine, if belated, check, and any honest account of the bill should say so.

What it does not provide, and what PRS's own analysis of the bill confirms it does not provide, is any appeal against the decision that starts the whole process: the non-renewal of a certificate in the first place. Under both the existing Act and the new bill, an organisation can appeal a cancellation to the High Court, but not a simple refusal to renew, and it is not entitled to a hearing before that refusal is made. Put plainly: an organisation may eventually get a judge to review what the state has done with its hospital. It does not get a hearing before the state decides to take it.

None of this means foreign funding of civil society deserves no oversight at all. I do not believe that, and this is not a piece arguing it. India's government points to the Financial Action Task Force when it defends tighter scrutiny of foreign-funded organisations, and the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law reports that FATF's own 2024 evaluation of India is real: it does call for stronger oversight of the sector.

But it calls for a targeted, risk-based approach aimed at organisations actually exposed to terrorism financing, alongside more consultation with civil society, not a statutory asset-vesting mechanism capable of applying to any FCRA organisation whose registration is cancelled, surrendered, expires or is not renewed. The government's own justification, read carefully, does not stretch as far as the government's own bill.

Where this stands as I write is itself instructive. The bill was deferred once already, in early April 2026, reportedly amid concern about the political reaction among Christian voters in Kerala. It returned to Parliament's legislative agenda when the monsoon session opened on 20 July. Tamil Nadu's Legislative Assembly voted unanimously on 11 August to ask the Centre to withdraw it. Christian delegations, the Mizoram Chief Minister, and opposition MPs have all met with Amit Shah in the past fortnight; he has assured at least one delegation the bill will not apply retrospectively.

Then, on 12 August, the government confirmed, per CNN-News18, that rather than proceed toward passage, the bill would be sent to a Joint Parliamentary Committee for further scrutiny and wider consultation. The bill has not been withdrawn, and the provisions this piece has examined remain alive. But the concerns raised by Christian organisations, minority representatives, state leaders, and opposition MPs proved substantial enough to secure another layer of parliamentary examination before the bill goes further.

The fight is not over. But for those who asked for time, scrutiny, and consultation, this is a meaningful reprieve.

The prayer that opened this piece, that the legislation not simply pass within days, was in that narrow sense answered. I do not know what to make of that beyond saying it plainly.

I have spent much of this year tracing how administrative process, not open legislative debate, is where an institution's independence is actually won or lost, an argument running underneath my Fabian Socialism series. India is offering an accelerated, more visible version of a question I am still asking about my own country: whether a religious institution's freedom to run its own hospitals and schools can survive being made permanently conditional on a government's ongoing goodwill.

Every person in this story carries the image of God, and none of them are reducible to a side. The children and families World Vision India served for seventy years bear it. The staff who stayed through eighteen months of suspended registration, uncertain whether they would have a job to return to, bear it. Archbishop Couto and the bishops who wrote calmly and constitutionally rather than politically bear it. So do the officials at India's Ministry of Home Affairs, most of whom, I have to assume, believe genuinely that they are closing a real loophole in a national-security law, not persecuting anyone. I am not in a position to read anyone's motives from Australia. I am in a position to ask what the mechanism itself makes possible, regardless of what any individual currently intends by it.

So I am left asking a narrower question than whether India is persecuting Christians, because I do not think the evidence lets me answer that one from here. I am asking whether a state can create a pathway by which non-renewal of an administrative certificate can ultimately place an institution's hospitals or schools under state control, without a prior hearing on the non-renewal and without a direct appeal against that decision, and still meaningfully claim that religious freedom survives intact.

I am asking whether “the sanctuary is protected” is doing more rhetorical work in that bill than it can bear, given how much of the Church's actual mission has never lived inside a sanctuary at all. And I am asking, as I have asked before about my own country, what any government, ours included, is capable of once it decides that an institution's independence is a licence it can revoke rather than a freedom it must respect.

Christianity does not deny Caesar his proper authority. It denies that everything within Caesar's reach therefore belongs to Caesar.

Give back to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's.

— Matthew 22:21

Thanks for reading.

God bless.

Mark