As the Catholic Church in India prepares for nationwide prayers on Sunday, June 28, to voice its concerns over legislation affecting Church ministries, the federal government has issued tougher rules under the country's existing law on foreign donations.
"This is totally unnecessary," Father Mathew Koyickal, deputy secretary general of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India (CBCI), told EWTN News June 26.
Koyickal was summing up the Church's concerns, which were laid out at a June 24 news conference at the CBCI Centre in New Delhi, after the government imposed harsher rules to enforce the existing provisions of the FCRA (Foreign Contribution Regulation Act).
The new rules, issued on June 22, require action groups and charities that receive foreign funds to specify their activities by category and geographical area, disclose their social media accounts, websites, and publications, and pay a separate fee for each category and area in which they operate. Political content is barred, and the rules impose high penalties for each infringement.
Describing the rules as "alarming," Koyickal said: "We feel at this moment, it was unnecessary because already there is a new amendment bill happening, and we have already shared our concern with regard to the proposed amendment."
Koyickal declined to comment when EWTN News asked whether the government's move was a "tit-for-tat" response to the pressure the Church has placed on the government through its June 28 nationwide call for prayers and protests.
"The proposed legislation (FCRA amendment) has generated concerns regarding its potential impact on the charitable, educational, healthcare, and social ministries undertaken by Churches and Christian institutions throughout the country," said Cardinal Anthony Poola, CBCI president and Archbishop of Hyderabad, in his June 17 appeal.
Recalling the Church's longstanding commitment to serving the poor, marginalized, and vulnerable sections of society, Poola emphasized that these ministries are a concrete expression of the Gospel values of love, justice, and compassion and "invited the faithful to unite in prayer for the nation, for public authorities, and for the continued freedom of the Church to carry out its mission of service."
"A draconian law has been already proposed. So, we have been trying to appeal to the government. We hope that the government will come up with a law that could help the NGOs to work for the development of our country," Koyickal told the news conference.
Though the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government had announced the harsher amendment to the FCRA and planned to pass it in Parliament on April 1, vociferous opposition inside Parliament and public opposition, including from Catholic Church leadership, forced the government to delay the bill to the monsoon session in July.
The new rules also drew opposition from outside the Church. KC Venugopal, general secretary of the opposition Congress party, wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on June 25 urging their immediate withdrawal, saying they were "designed not to regulate, but to strangle" the country's nongovernmental organizations.
The FCRA rules have been changed nine times since the BJP came to power in 2014. The government's FCRA Online dashboard shows that fewer than 15,000 of about 52,000 FCRA accounts are active.
The 37,000 FCRA licenses that have been canceled or not renewed include those of church charities and Christian social action groups, along with those of secular advocacy networks, including international organizations such as Amnesty International, Bread for the World, Compassion International, and Greenpeace.
'Total restriction of all sorts'
"These norms amount to emasculating the work of the Church," said John Dayal, a Catholic journalist who was among the first to publicize the new FCRA rules.
"The fresh curbs," Dayal said, "amounts to total restriction of all sorts and silences the right to speak out on issues of truth and justice."
Church charities that receive foreign donations, Dayal said, will be "reduced to silent spectators in India: forced to pray behind closed walls, run schools and hospitals with their mouth shut to intervene or speak out on social concerns."
