FCRA Amendments: Foreign Money, Religious Conversion, and the Question of National Integrity

(Originally Published in the Organiser)

History of Foreign Funds and Religious Conversions

Tell the story of Christianity in India the way it is usually told, and it sounds like a gift. Men crossed oceans to build schools where there had been none, to set type in languages that had never been printed, and to open clinics in places a doctor had never reached. All of that happened; none of it is the complete truth. Underneath the ledger of good works ran a second ledger, and on that one the entries were political. For instance, in colonial Assam, the spread of the Gospel, the machinery of the colonial state, and the schoolroom were not three separate things but one braided enterprise, and the men who ran it knew as much.

Look at the timing first, because timing gives the game away. The Western-origin faiths did not drift into India on their own current; they arrived on the tide of conquest. Take the example of Northeast India, the gate opened in 1826 with the Treaty of Yandabo, which ended the First Anglo-Burmese War and ceded Assam to the British Raj. Only once that transfer was sealed did the Western missionary societies find the door unlocked, and they moved in through the administrative scaffolding the Company had just finished building. Missionary thinkers of the period made little effort to hide the political utility of their work; some spelled it right out. Among evangelical circles in Britain, the case was made that winning colonial subjects to the faith would firm up the machinery of imperial rule rather than merely save souls. The Serampore missionary Joshua Marshman put it in almost administrative terms, "that one of the most effectual means of perpetuating the British dominion in India would be 'the calm and silent, but steady and constant, diffusion of Christian light among the natives”. Read plainly, a claim like that recasts evangelism as an instrument of statecraft, something that could steady a foreign government and lend it a veneer of moral warrant.

In Assam, missionaries learned early that preaching alone did not get them very far. The American Baptists started out by speaking openly in the bazaars and villages of the Brahmaputra valley, but few people converted. So, they changed their approach. Instead of preaching directly, they set up schools, printed religious books in local languages, translated Christian texts, and ran clinics and hospitals. These institutions genuinely helped people, but they also worked quietly, over time, to bring them toward the faith. Education became their most powerful tool. Protestant missionaries believed a person could only truly grasp Christian teaching by reading the Bible for himself, so learning to read and accepting the faith went hand in hand. Their schools were not built just to teach basic lessons; they were meant to produce readers who could then engage with scripture. Scholars call this method preparatio evangelica: using education first to prepare the ground, so that a society would slowly become open to Christianity.

The Colonial Raj was no bystander in this. Across several districts, it handed the missions the job of running schools, paid for them with public money, and allowed religious teaching in the classroom, having decided, in the blunt words of one official order, that religion was the only thing that really worked on these communities. By the 1850s, the numbers told the story: mission schools across British India were teaching over a hundred thousand pupils, compared with only about twenty-three thousand in government schools. On the frontier, in short, the church had become the state's own cultural arm.

A word of precision, because everything downstream depends on it. This record proves that on the colonial frontier, conversion and governance propped each other up, and that foreign religious money and men were spent with a clear eye on their political dividend.

History bears witness to how foreign money, or foreign meddling, drew a clear line across the hill country. Throughout the 1940s, senior British officials debated the Crown Colony of Eastern Agency, known as the Coupland Plan. The idea was to separate the tribal hills of Assam, from the Naga and Lushai ranges to the North East Frontier Agency, join them to the neighbouring tribal areas of Burma, and keep the whole block under British control even after the rest of India became free. Governor Robert Reid's confidential 1941 note argued that the hill peoples were fundamentally different from the plains and should work out their future free of Indian political domination. The colonial plotters bet that the Christian character the missions had built up over a century was exactly what made the "they are different" argument believable, so religion and strategy fed off each other.

What matters about the scheme is not that it succeeded but how it failed, and it failed largely because the very people it meant to fence off refused it, and Reid's own successor, Governor Andrew Clow, dismissed the plan as unworkable.

Even after more than seven decades of independence, the issues of foreign funding, religious conversion under the guise of social work, and challenges to national integrity refuse to die down. The present quarrel inherits this whole lineage and boils it down to a whole new phrase. Commentators who monitor these areas now sound the alarm over a meta version of the crown colony, i.e., "Jesus Corridor", an allegedly dark funded ribbon of Christian demographic expansion said to run from Sikkim, north Bengal through the Bodo areas, the tea belts across, and into Arunachal Pradesh, with named politicians and churches cast as its facilitators and fresh church-building in border districts offered as proof of a coordinated demographic design.

Two things are true at once, and a serious reader has to carry both. The first: the strategic unease is not lunacy. This is contested frontier ground, and the colonial precedent shows plainly that foreign-funded religion here has, before now, done political work. The second: the "Jesus Corridor," taken as a claim about a coordinated conspiracy unfolding today, runs well past its evidence.

The foreign hand, on the record and in proportion

What lends the unease a concrete grip is a genuine, documented habit of foreign nationals conducting religious work in the region in breach of Indian law. In October 2022, the Assam police picked up three Swedish citizens, Hannah Mikaela Bloom, Marcus Arne Henrik Bloom, and Susanna Elisabeth Hakanason, at a magical healing gathering in the tea-garden belt of Dibrugarh district, violating their tourist visas, which did not permit religious activity; each was fined 500 dollars under Section 14 of the Foreigners Act and deported. Days later, on 28 October, seven German nationals were detained near Kaziranga in Golaghat district for the same offence, having taken part in Magical healing and proselytisation work in Tinsukia, Margherita, and Karbi Anglong on tourist visas, and two Indian organisers were arrested alongside them. Indian law reserves religious work for holders of a missionary (M-1) visa, and all ten Europeans were found to have flouted that condition with no regard for the laws of the land. They not only flouted visa rules but also broke the Drugs and Magic Remedies Act 1954.

So, the honest reading is that foreign nationals did, as a matter of record, conduct unauthorised religious activity while utilising FCRA funds in sensitive border districts in defiance of visa law, and the state was within its rights to act. The through-line worth keeping is the method, not the melodrama. The Gossner and Baptist missions of the nineteenth century worked through relief, institutions, and money from abroad; the modern episodes work through festivals, networks, and personnel from abroad. Same family of instruments, two centuries apart, which is why the historical lens is analytically useful.

On the demographic claim itself, the figures cut both ways and deserve to be quoted rather than gestured at. Nationally, the Christian share has held near 2.3 per cent across recent censuses, yet of the twenty thousand-plus FCRA registrations cancelled over the past decade, a lopsided share by some counts, more than seventy per cent of those whose licences lapsed by early 2022 belonged to Christian-aligned bodies. Government calls this a compliance story; critics call it targeting. What the number will not bear is the full weight of either a demographic-emergency narrative or a clean bill of health. It proves the intensity of the foreign-funded Christian organisations, and nothing more certain than that.

The FCRA Amendments, why it was rewritten, where it leaked, and what was plugged

Start with the scale of the flows, because the raw magnitude resets the question. In the three years from 2019 to 2022, FCRA-registered bodies in India received more than 55,741 crores in foreign contributions; the annual figure for 2024-25 was roughly 20,000 crores. This is not the loose change of parish charity; it is capital on a scale that can move public opinion, bankroll agitations, tilt an electoral mood, and lean on policy, all of it arriving under the roomy, unfussy heading of "social work." So, the real question is not whether money like this ought to be watched, which answers itself, but whether the pre-2020 law could actually watch it. It could not, and the enforcement history says why: more than 20,700 registrations have been cancelled since the Act came into being, a tally of FCRA bodies that could not say where their foreign money went with those accused of steering it toward ends hostile to the national interest. A regime forced to void twenty thousand licences was certainly in desperate need of new amendments in the first place.

The state argued exactly this in open court. The Solicitor General told the Supreme Court that foreign inflows had roughly doubled between 2010 and 2019 and pointed to Intelligence Bureau material suggesting that some of the money had gone towards "Naxalite and other activities". The Home Ministry has, in its own assessments, repeatedly logged intelligence that foreign contributions moving through nominally charitable channels were being used to disturb public order and to influence policy in sensitive sectors such as the environment and energy. One can decline to take every such claim at face value and still grant the structural point beneath it: money on this scale, entering through thousands of intermediaries, is a strategic quantity, and a state that cannot trace it to its final use has quietly ceded a slice of its own sovereignty.

Three ways the old law leaked

Against that backdrop, the pre-2020 design had three holes, each of which the government could name to the decimal.

The first, and the deepest, was sub-granting. The original Section 7 allowed a registered body to pass foreign funds on to other registered bodies and to unregistered ones with prior clearance. On paper each link filed its returns, so the trail looked intact. In the field, a stacked chain a large, well-wired NGO raising money abroad and fanning it out through a spreading mesh of smaller ones made the final use of the funds almost impossible to follow. The government's case, which the Court accepted, was that some registered NGOs had turned into pipes: their real function was not to run a programme but to channel cash, which runs counter to the whole point of registration. An FCRA licence is issued to an outfit with a "definite programme"; a body that mostly disburses to others hollows that premise out and defeats any audit. Investigators have since flagged the maturing of this trick into "pocket funding" deliberately sized to duck below reporting thresholds, which is precisely the evasion a transfer chain makes possible.

The second was financial slack; the old law let up to half of all foreign contributions go to "administrative expenses". Fifty per cent is an enormous allowance. Half of every incoming rupee could lawfully vanish into salaries, offices, travel, overhead meaning money nominally raised for a programme could in practice keep a standing organisation and its staff on their feet, funding activity only loosely tethered to the charitable object on the certificate. Whether that was rampant abuse or merely the cost of operating across a subcontinent is where government and sector split; but as a mechanism, the slack was real and generous.

The third was scattered banking; Foreign contributions could land across a spread of accounts in different banks and branches, which turned centralised, near-live monitoring into a chore bordering on the impossible. If the state wanted a single point at which every rupee of foreign money entered and could be reconciled, the old arrangement never provided one. Layered over these three sat the softer features that made them worse: cancellation orders often left unpublished on security grounds, and a definition of forbidden "political activity" loose enough to catch a great deal. These are the very features critics invoke when they call the law an instrument against dissent as much as a shield against abuse a tension worth naming out loud rather than tucking away, and one this essay returns to.

The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Act, 2020, in force from 29 September 2020, went at all three holes head-on and without subtlety.

It rewrote Section 7 to forbid the transfer of foreign contributions to any other person registered or not, body or individual. This did not tighten sub-granting; it ended it. The chain was cut at the first link, and whoever received foreign money now had to spend it on their own declared programme. Of all the changes in the package, this is the one that bites hardest because it strikes at the traceability problem at its root. It amended Section 8 to lower the administrative-expense ceiling from 50 to 20 per cent, sharply reducing the room for programme money to be converted into standing overhead. It imposed the designated "FCRA Account" rule, requiring every rupee of foreign contribution to arrive in a single account at the State Bank of India's main branch in New Delhi, finally furnishing the central gateway the old regime lacked, and it let the government freeze an organisation's use of funds after a summary inquiry.

When the package was challenged, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court upheld its core in Noel Harper v. Union of India on 8 April 2022. The reasoning became the spine of everything that followed: there is no fundamental right to receive foreign contributions; the freedom to associate does not confer a right to unregulated foreign money; and the curbs were reasonable, given that foreign inflows can materially reshape the country's social and political order. The Court struck down only the demand for that one specific SBI branch as unreasonable, leaving the centralised-account architecture standing.

The 2025 Rules and the 2026 Amendment Bill then pushed the logic outward from money to activity and assets. Registration turned purpose-and-place specific: an organisation must now pick its work from five heads religious, social, economic, cultural, educational and name the states it will operate in, with a year's grace for existing bodies and fresh approval required for any later spread. The category of "key functionary" was widened to catch those who pull the strings without holding the title. Most pointed for this essay, foreign-funded religious activity was permitted only where it stops short of proselytisation, pushing conversion driven work outside the sanctioned purposes altogether. Disclosure was stretched to cover social media handles, publications, and ultimate donors, and when Home Minister Amit Shah introduced the Bill on 25 March 2026, he cited the alleged abuse of foreign funds for religious conversion as one of the reasons for it.

The 2026 Bill went furthest, establishing a Designated Authority with the power to take provisional, sometimes lasting, control of foreign contributions and the assets built from them once a registration is cancelled, surrendered, or lapses, including assets funded even partly by foreign money, with proceeds routed to the Consolidated Fund of India.

On the one hand, the spine of the reform is coherent and, on its own terms, defensible. The old law built a tracking system that could be beaten by stacking transfers, padding overheads, and scattering accounts; the amendments shut each of those doors, and the Supreme Court affirmed the state's authority to police foreign money in the national interest. For anyone worried that foreign funds were coming in under one label and going out under another for conversion, for agitation, for ends never disclosed to the regulator, this is exactly the apparatus needed to make the swap visible and punishable. The scale settles it: 20,000 crore a year is not a sum a serious state leaves in the dark. The verdict is this, the reforms closed real, nameable gaps that a serious state could not have left open at this scale of foreign money, and closing them was necessary.

What charity is, and what it is not

Lay it all side by side and a measured conclusion comes into focus, one that neither waves away the concern nor feeds the panic. Foreign religious money on the eastern frontier, or the so-called #JESUS CORRIDOR, has a documented history of serving ends beyond faith; under empire, it was, frankly, an arm of governance, and the mechanism of institution-led, foreign-funded conversion is still recognisably running, as the 2022 visa cases show. A state is wholly entitled to insist that money and people crossing its borders in religion's name do so openly, lawfully, and without inducement and the FCRA reforms, whatever their rough edges, are a coherent attempt to make foreign funds answer for their declared ends.

But the principle that finally carries the most weight is also the plainest, and it lands cleanest when stated without exaggeration.

Real humanitarian service a school, a clinic, grain in a famine needs no conversion pinned to it to be worthy; charity that comes priced in a change of faith is not charity but a transaction.

To deploy foreign funds in building inducements that engineer religious conversion is not service to humanity. It is the purchasing of belief, and it degrades both the dignity of the one converted and the trust of the nation that took the giver in. The frontier will be held the way it was held in 1946 by binding its people to the common project through their consent and their flourishing, and not by fear over who they kneel to, nor by anyone, foreign, treating faith by a coin, access to education or charity.

References:

Copland, I. (2006). Christianity as an Arm of Empire: The Ambiguous Case of India under the Company. The Historical Journal, 1025-1054.
Ghosh, A. (2011). CONVERSIONS, EDUCATION AND LINGUISTIC IDENTITY IN ASSAM THE AMERICAN. Indian History Congress, Vol. 72, PART-I (2011), pp. 863.
Ghosh, A. (2014). EVANGELISM IN ASSAM: SCHOOLS AND PRINT CULTURE (1830S-1890S). Indian History Congress, Vol. 75.
ICRR. (2022, July 26). Mizo Church Aggression in Assam: A New Frontier. From Institute for Conflict Research and Resolution: https://www.icrr.in//Encyc/2022/7/26/Mizo-Church-Aggression inAssam.html
Phillips, E. G. (1992). History Sketch of the Garo Field," In The Assam Mission of the American Baptist Missionary Union, Papers and discussion of the Jubilee conference held in Nowgong, December 18-29, 1886. 54-79.
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