In early August 2026, Riley Moore, a Republican member of the United States Congress from West Virginia, posted a statement on X about India’s FCRA amendments. He opened by invoking St Thomas the Apostle’s arrival on the Malabar Coast, as though nineteen centuries of Christian presence in Kerala settle a 2026 question about how India regulates foreign money entering its own institutions.
That claim is itself contested. The South Indian narrative rests mainly on the early-3rd-century apocryphal Acts of Thomas (which places him primarily with the Indo-Parthian king Gondophares in the northwest) and on later church tradition. Many modern scholars treat the specific Kerala founding story as legend, because no 1st-century evidence for it survives. Then came the line that actually mattered: he called the amendments “a clear attack against Christians,” and warned that if the bill proceeded, it “would be a point of major concern in our bilateral relationship with India.”
Read that sentence again, slowly. A member of a foreign legislature, sitting nearly eight thousand miles from Delhi, telling a sovereign nation that its own domestic financial oversight law will be treated as a strategic problem between two countries, unless India regulates its own institutions the way a section of Capitol Hill prefers.
This is not a fringe voice. This is not a think tank paper that nobody reads. This is a sitting Congressman, on the record, in his own name.
Moore’s post also told you something else worth sitting with. He didn’t quote the bill’s actual text. He didn’t cite a single Indian church shut down for its faith. He reached straight past a decade of documented compliance failures, past the contested history of the very apostolic tradition he invoked, and straight to the threat of diplomatic consequence.
That is not how a genuine legal argument gets made. That is how a religious argument gets dressed up as a legal one, because the people making it were never really talking about compliance in the first place.
There is an irony here worth naming. America marks 250 years of independence from Britain this year, on land taken from Native American nations who were displaced, killed and converted along the way. The heirs of that project now cry persecution on behalf of Christians in India.
Jews and Parsis came to India as refugees, found shelter under Hindu kings, and have never complained of persecution. In India, unlike in many Muslim-majority and Communist countries, nobody is killed for owning a Bible or practising Christianity. So why do the proselytising faiths, the largest in the world, cry persecution here? What is this really about?
AMERICA WAS NEVER secular, under either party. Americans like to think there is a wall between church and state, written into their own First Amendment. It is worth asking, plainly, whether the record supports that description, or supports it only within America’s own borders and stops the moment American power extends beyond them.
Start with where the country came from. The Puritans who settled New England did not see themselves as building a secular republic. John Winthrop, in 1630, called his colony “a city upon a hill,” a phrase drawn straight from the Gospel of Matthew, meant to describe a community whose entire purpose was religious. Two centuries later, the idea that America was destined to expand across the continent, “Manifest Destiny,” was not treated as ordinary land-grabbing. It was treated as something God had assigned to the nation, “allotted by Providence,” in the words of the man who coined the phrase. American expansion westward, including the displacement of Native nations, was carried out by people who genuinely believed they were fulfilling a divine plan, not merely pursuing territory.
None of that is ancient history confined to a textbook. It is the direct ancestor of the machinery running today, and that machinery has never cared which party sits in the White House.
A Democratic president, Bill Clinton, signed the International Religious Freedom Act into law in October 1998, a bill built by an evangelical lobbying campaign that began at a Washington hotel summit less than three years earlier. A Republican president, George W. Bush, created the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives within weeks of taking office, opening federal money to religious organisations, and USAID soon opened a faith-based office of its own. His Secretary of State, Colin Powell, told a room of NGO leaders in October 2001 that they were “such a force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team.” He added the sentence that still does the real work: “Always, we must respect your independence. After all, it is the very fact of your being independent and not an arm of government that makes you so valuable.”
That is not a slip of the tongue. That is the man running American foreign policy describing civic and religious organisations as an extension of the state, and admitting that the appearance of independence is what gives the channel its power.
A Democratic administration under Barack Obama did not dismantle any of this machinery. USCIRF kept issuing its annual reports through his two terms. In 2019, a Democratic congresswoman, Pramila Jayapal, hosted the first congressional briefing on caste discrimination. Its subject was caste in America, but it gave the caste argument, which an evangelical network had first carried into a congressional hearing in 2005, a home in progressive politics. The theology changed its address, from a church basement to a university seminar room, but the underlying claim, that America has standing to judge and correct another nation’s internal religious and social arrangements, never went out of fashion, whoever held the gavel.
This is the point worth making plainly, without hedging. It does not matter whether a Republican or a Democrat occupies the White House when this argument comes to India’s door. The vocabulary shifts, human rights on one side, religious freedom on the other, but the underlying conviction stays the same: that America’s values are not simply America’s own business; they are everyone’s business, and any nation that regulates them within its own borders has committed an offence requiring correction.
That is not secularism. That is a proselytising, expansionist religion wearing a secular civil coat, and it has worn that coat under six presidents from both parties without once taking it off.
Samuel Huntington, writing in the 1990s about the limits of Western universalism, put the problem more sharply: “In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.” What is universalism to the West is often experienced as imperialism by the rest. The FCRA fight is one more instance of that collision.
IF PROOF IS needed that this arrangement was never accidental, it exists in America’s own Senate record, documented by America’s own investigators, not alleged by anyone in India.
The Church Committee, set up in 1975 after a decade of intelligence abuses came to light, confirmed that the CIA had covertly used American clergy and missionaries abroad as intelligence assets, documenting the operational use of twenty-one individuals, four of them still active at the time. Some of those relationships involved payments and participation in covert-action projects directed at “competing with communism in the Third World.” One pastor in a Third World country was used as a principal agent, spotting, recruiting, collecting political information and passing along propaganda, while receiving a salary for over a decade. Facing that exposure, George H.W. Bush, then Director of the CIA, issued a policy directive in 1976 formally forbidding paid contractual relationships between the agency and American missionaries or clergy.
Read what the policy actually allowed, because that is where the real story sits. It still permitted the CIA to accept intelligence volunteered by American clergy at any time. It still permitted the agency to initiate contact with them on US soil. And it did not apply at all to pastors or missionaries from other countries operating anywhere in the world. A man who would go on to become President of the United States signed his own name to an arrangement that gave American religious workers deniability without meaningfully closing the door it appeared to shut.
The same logic continued, only now in the open. Allen Weinstein, who helped design the National Endowment for Democracy, told the Washington Post in 1991 that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” Carl Gershman, NED’s long-time president, explained that the endowment existed so that democratic groups abroad would not have to be seen as subsidised by the CIA. The network of American-funded NGOs and democracy-promotion outfits was built to do in public view some of what the agency had once done in secret.
That is not an Indian suspicion. That is Washington’s own documented history, recorded by its own Senate, a quarter century before any Colorado boardroom existed to carry the same instinct into the caste debate.
The same era produced the classic “triple-pass” funding technique: agency money to a dummy front foundation, then to a legitimate, prominent foundation, then to the final recipient, often without the recipient knowing the ultimate source. Of roughly seven hundred large grants by foundations other than the Big Three between 1963 and 1966, the Church Committee found that at least one hundred and eight involved partial or complete CIA funding; nearly half of the grants for international activities carried the same fingerprint. Foundations were preferred precisely because they could move money with plausible private cover.
HERE IS WHERE the hypocrisy becomes measurable rather than merely felt. The United States passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act in 1938, to track Nazi propaganda operating inside America. The law requires anyone acting on behalf of a foreign government, party or organisation to register with the Department of Justice, disclose where their money comes from, and label their communications as foreign-influenced material. Wilful violations are criminal offences. Washington has enforced the law with growing vigour since 2017, against lobbyists, foreign-funded think tanks and state media outlets, and it is broadly accepted in America as a country protecting its own political process from money it cannot see or trace.
FCRA rests on the same principle for India. It is stricter than FARA in places: it bars some recipients outright, forbids passing foreign money on to other organisations, and can require prior permission. But its core is the same. Register the source. Report where the money goes. It has existed since 1976, tightened by governments of every stripe, Congress and BJP alike, because both parties eventually reached the same conclusion: that unregulated foreign money flowing into Indian institutions is a national concern, whichever government is in office.
India’s own Supreme Court, in the 2022 Noel Harper judgment upholding key 2020 amendments, stated the principle without ambiguity: there is no fundamental right to receive foreign contributions. Such contributions “could have a material impact on the socioeconomic structure and polity of the country.” Organisations, the Court said, may instead focus on donors within the country “to obviate influence of foreign country owing to foreign contribution.” That is not a fringe opinion. It is the highest court of a democracy describing the same sovereignty logic America claims for itself under FARA.
The 2026 Bill would extend that architecture in one specific direction. If an organisation’s registration lapses or is cancelled, and it built assets, buildings, land or schools with foreign money, the state could take provisional control of those assets rather than letting them sit in limbo or pass quietly into unaccountable hands. The power applies to organisations that have already fallen out of a regime they agreed to when they registered. It does not touch the faith of anyone.
So ask the plain question, the one this piece keeps returning to because nobody in Washington has offered an honest answer to it. If FARA is sovereignty, why is FCRA persecution? Both laws do the same job. Both exist to let a government see its own information and funding space clearly. The only difference is which country is doing the regulating, and which country is used to being regulated. That is not a legal distinction. It is a habit, built over centuries of one side giving instructions and the other side being expected to receive them, and it has outlasted communism, the Cold War, and every American president since Roosevelt signed FARA into law.
ONCE YOU KNOW what to watch for, the pattern of American pressure stops looking like coincidence and starts looking like a checklist. The people who built the machine described it themselves, and their own words are the best evidence available.
The first symptom is language that treats civil society as an extension of state power. Powell’s “combat team” is the clearest example, and it came from the Secretary of State of the United States, on the record.
The second symptom is the admission that the covert and open versions were always doing the same job. Weinstein said it to the Washington Post in 1991. It was not extracted under pressure. By then there was no longer any need to hide it.
The third symptom is foundations doing quietly what a government cannot do openly, because a foundation can move money without its recipient knowing where it came from. That is the mechanism India’s Home Ministry has been watching for. It placed the Ford Foundation on a prior-permission list in 2015, after concerns that its funds were reaching unregistered groups, and did the same to George Soros’s Open Society Foundations in 2016. In March 2025, the Enforcement Directorate searched Open Society’s Bengaluru offices under the Foreign Exchange Management Act. The architecture is not limited to churches. Secular foundations, democracy-promotion outfits and development NGOs have long served parallel functions.
The fourth symptom is money reaching exactly the places that make a country most vulnerable, not the places that make the headlines look best. The Enforcement Directorate’s case against the Timothy Initiative, an American church-planting organisation the ED says is not registered under FCRA, alleges that about Rs 92.55 crore entered India through foreign debit cards between November 2025 and April 2026, and that about Rs 6.34 crore was withdrawn in Bastar and Dhamtari, districts inside India’s Left-Wing Extremism corridor. A Congressman in West Virginia can quote St Thomas the Apostle. He cannot explain Dhamtari.
None of these symptoms requires believing in a single coordinated conspiracy directing every event to the letter. They require only reading the people who built this machine in their own words, and noticing that the same behaviour keeps appearing, in different countries, under different administrations, whenever India, or any other nation, touches an American interest that Washington did not expect to lose control of.
The pattern is older than Washington and broader than churches. When the Soviet Union had the resources, it ran its own parallel architecture of front organisations, peace movements and selective funding. China today prefers different instruments: large-scale infrastructure lending that creates leverage, Confucius Institutes and United Front work. Post-colonial European powers largely lost the capacity for sustained influence operations on this scale. The United States retains unique advantages: the deepest private philanthropic sector, the most extensive faith-based transnational networks, the largest democracy-promotion bureaucracy, the global reserve currency, and the densest web of foundations and NGOs that can move money and ideas with plausible deniability. That is why FCRA-type regulation collides most visibly with American actors and American rhetoric; hegemonic capacity, not moral exceptionalism, explains the volume and persistence of the pressure.
Scholars have described the same thing. The political scientist Inderjeet Parmar has analysed how major American foundations function as instruments of cultural and institutional influence in non-Western societies, while the economist Michael Hudson has described a form of financial imperialism that uses debt leverage, international financial institutions and related networks, foundations and NGOs among them, to shape other countries’ policies. India’s Supreme Court has held that the free and uncontrolled inflow of foreign contribution has the potential to affect the sovereignty and integrity of the nation, its public order and the interests of the general public. Successive governments have pointed to concrete cases: the Narmada Bachao Andolan’s international campaign, which helped force the World Bank’s 1993 withdrawal from the Sardar Sarovar Dam; the Kudankulam nuclear plant protests, which then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh publicly blamed on NGOs funded from the United States and Scandinavia; intelligence assessments linking foreign-backed protests against mining, steel, coal and power projects to economic costs; and the continuing fight over the strategically vital Great Nicobar project.
ONE PART OF this fight deserves special attention: the room where India’s Dalit reservation fight was built for an American audience. It shows how the theopolitical machine operates in practice, not in theory.
In 2002, an Indian Christian leader, Joseph D’Souza, co-founded an organisation called the Dalit Freedom Network with American partners, headquartered in Greenwood Village, Colorado. An American-registered body, run with American money, set out to speak for India’s Dalits. Reservation is an internal matter. So is caste.
On 6 October 2005, D’Souza sat before a United States congressional subcommittee, chaired by Congressman Chris Smith, at a hearing about India’s caste system. He told American lawmakers that “denying a constitutional right to a large percentage of the population based solely on religion is illegal and immoral.” Nobody in India sent him there. An American organisation, funded with American money, invited by an American committee chairman, put him in that chair. And what he said in that room did not stay in that room. It travelled back into India as though it had always been a purely domestic grievance.
This matters because the demand itself deserves to be understood honestly, on its own terms, separate from who is carrying it. India’s Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order of 1950, as amended, restricts Scheduled Caste status to Dalits who are Hindu, Sikh or Buddhist. Convert to Christianity or Islam, and the status disappears. Christianity and Islam claim no caste hierarchy exists inside their own theology, which is exactly why the constitutional line was drawn where it was.
The demand to delete that line is an old Indian one. What the Colorado network gave it was an American vocabulary, “illegal and immoral”, and an American audience.
The standpoint also holds that classifying Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes outside the Hindu fold has balkanised Hindu society. Most tribals remain dharmic: they share the same rituals, nature worship and festivals that form the living core of the broader tradition. Hinduism has never been reducible to idol worship. Bihar’s non-idolatrous Chhath sun puja, Ganga puja, the observances of Purnima and the rites of Govardhan Puja all show the cultural continuity between these communities and the wider dharmic fold.
Converts from the Scheduled Tribes, whose status does not depend on religion, keep their tribal reservation while their churches run minority institutions under Article 30, a dual advantage no Hindu tribal enjoys. That is part of why anti-conversion laws were enacted, to protect the diversity of a civilisation that never possessed a proselytising mechanism of its own, and why the FCRA framework has been steadily strengthened.
Bishop Joseph D’Souza and the Dalit Freedom Network, funded through American institutions and church networks, remain among the most visible advocates for extending Scheduled Caste status to converts. They frame conversion as liberation from caste while insisting that caste-based benefits should follow the convert. The logic collapses under its own ambition: if conversion truly dissolves caste, the demand for continued caste reservation is incoherent; if caste persists after conversion, the claim of liberation is exposed as incomplete.
There is a further complication that deserves to be stated honestly, because it cuts against the claim that Christianity and Islam offer converts a unified escape from caste. They do not. Both carry their own divisions of sect and denomination. A Protestant cannot take communion at a Catholic mass. In Tamil Nadu, Dalit Catholics have fought for decades against separate cemeteries, separate seating and caste walls inside their own parishes, none of them built by upper-caste Hindus, who are not in those cemeteries. Pasmanda Muslims are still fighting for their rights against upper-caste Muslims, whose status rests on claimed descent from Arab and Prophetic lineages.
The irony is that if conversion promised an escape from division into unity, that promise does not hold even within the receiving faith. It is less an exit from hierarchy than a transfer into another one, this time sanctioned by theology. Muslims remain divided into Shia and Sunni and further into sub-sects that sometimes declare one another kafir; Christians have been divided between Catholic and Protestant since the Reformation. World history is evidence enough of what those divisions have done.
A sharper distinction sits underneath that observation, one that Ambedkar’s own choice pointed towards.
Caste is a social condition produced by Indian history; birth came to fix it as the varna-jati order hardened over centuries. Discrimination is real, and our own dharma gurus never denied it. The Buddha, Mahavira, the bhakti saints, the Sikh Gurus and the Arya Samaj all rose against it from within Indian society, without needing an outside force to make the amendments. Gotra traditions trace every family to the same rishis; on that reckoning, the divide exists in the mind, not in the blood. Social conditions can, in principle, be unmade by the same human effort that made them. That is the ground on which India’s reform tradition has always stood.
Conversion, by contrast, trades a changeable social wrong for an unchangeable theological one: identity is now anchored in divine commandment rather than social history, within a framework in which doctrine, not evolving social consensus, decides who belongs and who does not, who is legitimate and who is not.
There is a reason communities were converted in the first place, and it deserves to be said plainly. Proselytising Abrahamic traditions, in their own self-understanding, offer something the varna framework never claimed to offer: a single path to a singular truth, and a heaven reserved for those who take it. That is what gave colonial and missionary conversion its pull among communities already made to feel that their native identity carried no comparable promise, only social exclusion with no offered exit.
That mechanism is not unique to India. Aboriginal Australians, subjected to forced Christianisation and the near-total displacement of their own spiritual frameworks through missionary and settler institutions, would recognise the playbook. Native American nations, run through mission schools built explicitly to erase indigenous belief and replace it with the promise of a Christian heaven, would recognise it too. Zoroastrian Persia, the polytheistic and syncretic traditions of pre-Islamic Arabia and the wider Levant met the same theological offer at the point of conquest.
In every one of these cases, an indigenous, non-exclusivist framework met a theology built on exclusive truth and eternal reward, and the conversions that followed were shaped by a real, felt asymmetry: one side offering belonging within an existing, complicated social order, the other offering an exit from it altogether, with heaven attached.
India has tried to answer this question twice, seriously, through its own institutions, and both attempts deserve credit that almost never gets given. The Ranganath Misra Commission investigated for three years and reported in 2007, recommending that the constitutional line be deleted entirely. No government since has implemented it, and the Centre later told the Supreme Court the report had been written without proper field study. A second commission, under former Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan, was set up in 2022 to gather the empirical data the first commission’s critics said was missing. Its report was reported ready in June 2026 and remains unreleased, even as the Supreme Court held in March 2026, in Chinthada Anand v State of Andhra Pradesh, that conversion to Christianity ends Scheduled Caste status.
Say plainly what that sequence shows. Two full commissions. Years of fieldwork. More empirical seriousness than any American hearing room has brought to this question. India examined its own conscience twice, through its own institutions, answerable to its own Parliament and courts. The problem was never that India refused to look at itself honestly. It is that the loudest external voices in this fight have never done comparable work before demanding that India follow their conclusions instead of its own.
One more fact belongs here, because every side of this argument reaches for the same name and almost nobody sits with what he actually did. B.R. Ambedkar spent decades weighing conversion as an answer to untouchability. When he finally converted in October 1956, seven weeks before his death, he chose Buddhism, having looked at Islam and Christianity and set them aside as faiths that would carry his people out of the Indian tradition and into foreign institutional structures. He built his answer from inside the Indian tradition, not from outside it.
That is the one fact the Colorado network, which invokes his name freely, has never been able to explain away.
THE LOYALTY QUESTION is not an accusation. It is a design feature. There is one more layer to this that most commentary skips, because it sounds harsh stated plainly, and yet it comes from the theology’s own founding text rather than from any outside critic’s suspicion.
The New Testament states where a believer’s ultimate loyalty lies. Philippians 3:20 reads, “our citizenship is in heaven.” Inside that theology, every earthly nation is temporary and secondary, and the convert’s primary loyalty belongs to a kingdom that outranks it. That is not an extreme reading of the doctrine. It is the doctrine, in its own words.
Watch where that transferred loyalty lands, because it does not land the same way on every nation, and that unevenness is the real proof. When the National Socialist Council of Nagaland was founded in 1980, its manifesto declared its goal as “Nagaland for Christ”: a homeland dedicated by name to a faith that arrived from elsewhere, rather than to the land itself. And when the same evangelical tradition looks towards Israel, it does not treat that country as one nation among many.
A belief system called dispensationalism, of which more below, holds that a modern Jewish return to that land is a required piece of a religious timetable, not a foreign-policy preference. That is why a tradition whose church bodies in Nagaland backed protests against singing a hymn to India as the motherland treats a pilgrimage to Israel as an act of devotion without a moment’s hesitation.
That is not an inconsistency. It is the loyalty transfer, showing its shape once both ends are placed side by side. One nation earns unconditional reverence because a religious story requires it to exist. The other earns doctrinal suspicion because nothing in that story requires it at all. A belief system that tells its converts their true home is elsewhere, that funds multiplying churches through foreign boards rather than local ones, and that reserves its only unconditional earthly patriotism for one nation chosen by scripture rather than by a convert’s own birth, was never accidentally producing divided loyalty as a side effect of otherwise ordinary faith.
It was the product the architecture was built to deliver.
RILEY MOORE’S POST did not come from nowhere. It came from a machine built to make sure this kind of pressure never runs out of fuel.
In January 1996, a summit at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel produced a document called the Statement of Conscience on Worldwide Religious Persecution, issued by the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents tens of thousands of congregations. It pledged that evangelicals would press the American government to treat religious persecution abroad as a foreign-policy priority. Frank Wolf, a Republican congressman, carried that pledge into legislation, and it became the International Religious Freedom Act, signed by a Democratic president in October 1998. That law created the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, a body that produces an annual report grading other countries’ religious conduct and recommends which should be designated “Countries of Particular Concern”, the worst category.
Since 2020, USCIRF has recommended every year that India be placed in that category, alongside countries that jail people for praying the wrong way. The State Department has declined every year, because even Washington’s own diplomats can see the difference between a democracy that regulates and a country that persecutes.
Here is where the selectivity becomes impossible to miss. Saudi Arabia bans the public practice of any faith except Islam. Leaving Islam can carry the death penalty under its interpretation of sharia. No church, temple or gurdwara may operate openly anywhere in the kingdom. The State Department does designate Saudi Arabia a Country of Particular Concern, and has done so every year since 2004. Then, every year, it waives the penalties that designation is meant to bring, citing America’s national interest. India, a democracy with functioning churches, courts that hear religious-freedom cases, and an opposition that debates these exact questions in Parliament, is recommended for the same list by USCIRF year after year. The difference is the waiver. The measure is a lever, pulled where it serves American interest and suspended where pulling it would cost something. Huntington’s observation that “hypocrisy, double standards, and ‘but nots'” are the price of universalist pretensions fits the record with uncomfortable precision.
That machine has since gone further still. USCIRF’s 2025 report recommended targeted sanctions against India’s own foreign intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing. A body that began at a hotel prayer meeting in 1996 now formally asks Washington to punish the intelligence service of a nuclear-armed democracy it calls a strategic partner in the same breath.
There is a reason none of this loses momentum, whichever party holds power in Washington, and it has a name almost nobody in Indian commentary uses: dispensationalism. It is a way of reading the Bible, developed in the 1830s and spread widely through study Bibles from the early 1900s, that treats history as a countdown. One of its central beliefs is that Matthew 24:14 means the Christian message must be preached to the whole world before the end can arrive. Inside that belief, a regulation that slows missionary funding is not an annoying compliance rule. It is an obstacle between the world and an event its believers consider inevitable and near. That is not a fringe reading confined to a handful of preachers. It runs through a meaningful part of the American evangelical world that funds and staffs the institutions this piece has described, and it explains an urgency that ordinary political self-interest alone never fully accounts for.
NONE OF THIS stayed confined to Washington. Parts of it travelled back into India and were adopted by Indian church leadership too, and this is the part of the story that deserves to be said plainly rather than softened.
On 10 July 2026, a delegation from the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, led by Cardinal Anthony Poola and Archbishop Anil Couto, met Home Minister Amit Shah and handed him a memorandum. It bundled separate issues into a single package: the FCRA amendments, religious freedom and anti-conversion laws, Dalit Christian reservation, and the situation in Manipur.
Look closely at that bundling. It is the same technique D’Souza used in his 2005 testimony: fold a funding question, a constitutional question and a persecution claim into one moral package, and press all of it at once, whether or not the underlying legal issues have anything to do with each other. FCRA is a law about foreign money and transparency. Dalit reservation is a constitutional question about a specific historical category. They are not legally connected, and no Indian court has treated them as connected. The memorandum connected them anyway, because the connection was never a legal argument. It is an advocacy technique, and it mirrors the template tested in that American hearing room rather than anything built from India’s own constitutional language.
This does not mean every Indian Christian institution is disloyal, and it would be wrong and unfair to say so. Most of these institutions run genuine schools and hospitals that deserve to be defended on their own terms. What it means is narrower and more precise: when Indian church leadership needed a strategy to press its case with the Indian government, it reached for the one built in a Colorado boardroom and tested on Capitol Hill twenty-one years earlier, rather than one built from inside India’s own courts and Parliament. That instinct, to internationalise first and negotiate at home second, is what this piece has been naming from its first line: not a betrayal of faith, but a strategic habit borrowed from an American source.
That habit is not confined to a single memorandum in Delhi. On 11 August, the Council of Churches in Mizoram, a newly formed body of nine major churches, led thousands through Aizawl demanding the Bill’s repeal. Chief Minister Lalduhoma met Amit Shah with church leaders, submitted a memorandum, and asked the Centre to send the Bill to a Joint Parliamentary Committee. A sitting state government had lined up with church bodies against a Bill before its own Parliament, pressing much the same objections the CBCI memorandum had pressed a month earlier.
The template built in Colorado in 2002 is not a piece of history sitting in an archive. It was running in Aizawl in August, a week after Riley Moore’s post.
ON 13 AUGUST, the last day of the Monsoon Session, the Lok Sabha referred the FCRA Amendment Bill to a Joint Parliamentary Committee. The committee will delay it. What the Bill would do is already clear.
Three things would change in practice. First, if an organisation’s registration lapses or is cancelled, the government could take provisional control of assets built with foreign money, rather than leaving that property in limbo. Second, no FCRA investigation could begin without the Central Government’s approval, which centralises the decision in Delhi rather than leaving it open to scattered state-level action. Third, and this is the detail critics will keep returning to, the maximum prison sentence for violations would fall from five years to one. That change gives opponents their strongest argument, since a law built to punish serious foreign-fund diversion does not usually lower the ceiling on the punishment for it. Expect that contradiction to be argued before the committee, and in court if the Bill passes.
Expect American pressure to continue rather than fade, and to sharpen around the asset provision, since “the government can take over churches and hospitals” travels much further with an American audience than “the government requires registration,” even though the power would apply only once an organisation’s registration has lapsed or been cancelled. Expect USCIRF’s next report to cite the amendments by name. Expect at least one more congressional statement in the same register as Riley Moore’s within the year. None of that changes the case this piece has made. It confirms it, because the pressure was never really about the text of the Bill. It was about whether India gets to decide these questions for itself at all, and that argument will not end in a committee room.
WHILE USCIRF CONTINUES its annual ritual of grading other nations, it has never turned the same spotlight on the United States. By design, under the International Religious Freedom Act, its mandate is strictly international; it has no authority to examine conditions inside America. The country that created it still sits on the dispossessed lands of Native American nations. Of the roughly 370 treaties ratified between 1778 and 1871, the United States repeatedly broke its word. The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty guaranteeing the Black Hills to the Sioux was torn up once gold was found; in 1980, in United States v. Sioux Nation, the Supreme Court ruled the seizure illegal and awarded compensation the Sioux have refused to this day, insisting on the return of the land. The Treaty of New Echota was used to force the Cherokee onto the Trail of Tears, on which some four thousand died. The Standing Rock Sioux saw the Dakota Access Pipeline driven across treaty lands despite their opposition. In 2014, Congress approved handing the sacred Apache site of Oak Flat (Chi’chil Bildagoteel) to a copper-mining company, over Apache objections. The Dawes Act of 1887 and the allotment era that followed reduced the Native land base from 138 million acres to roughly 48 million. Overall, Indigenous nations lost nearly 99 per cent of their original homelands, and these communities continue to face the systemic denial of equal rights, sovereignty and justice.
The same body that lectures the world on religious freedom and minority rights finds no occasion to examine this unfinished colonial ledger at home. That silence is not an oversight. USCIRF was born from an evangelical mobilisation: the National Association of Evangelicals’ 1996 Statement of Conscience and the Wolf-Specter bill that became the International Religious Freedom Act were driven primarily by concern for the persecution of Christians abroad, and critics have long argued that its priorities still lean that way while claiming to reflect universal principles. The grading was never about universal principle. It was about power, and about who gets to hold the moral measuring stick while remaining exempt from it.
GO BACK TO where this piece started. A Congressman posts a statement invoking a first-century apostle to argue against a 2026 Indian Bill, and skips over every actual fact the Bill contains. That is not carelessness. That is what happens when the underlying belief was never really about facts.
America built a law, FARA, in 1938, to protect itself from exactly the kind of unregistered foreign influence it now calls persecution when India regulates it under FCRA. A future President signed his own name to a 1976 policy admitting American clergy had been used as intelligence assets abroad, and left the door open wide enough to keep doing it. An American-run network carried the Dalit reservation argument into a congressional hearing in 2005, in language that then travelled back into India dressed as a domestic grievance. A theology running through a meaningful part of that same world teaches converts that their true citizenship lies elsewhere, a belief visible in a Naga insurgent manifesto that dedicated a homeland to Christ. America built an entire government machine, starting at a hotel prayer meeting in 1996, signed into law by a Democratic president, expanded by a Republican one, sustained through every administration since, that grades India’s conduct every year while waiving the penalties on a Saudi kingdom that bans every other faith outright, because the grading was never really about the grade. And when one funding trail is traced through, the ED alleges, it does not end at a school or a hospital. It ends in Dhamtari, in a district the Indian state has spent decades trying to secure.
India examined its own hardest questions honestly, through two full commissions and its own courts, answerable to its own citizens. It has now drafted a law that asks for nothing America does not already demand of itself. And still, a sitting member of a foreign legislature felt entitled to tell India what to do with its own Parliament.
India did not ask Washington how to write FARA. It does not need Washington to tell it how to write FCRA.
