A bipartisan group of senators wants President Trump to push for the repeal of an anti-missionary law during his meeting Monday with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Under Modi’s leadership, India has placed restrictions on nonprofits’ ability to accept foreign funding for disfavored activities carried out in the country. The ban has undercut international organizations ranging from environmental activists such as Greenpeace to Christian missionaries, as Modi’s team is trying to modernize India’s economy while maintaining Hindu culture. It’s part of a broader international trend of undermining American nonprofits, while U.S. leaders press Trump to take a stronger stand on human rights.
“We are particularly concerned about violations of religious liberty in India,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., and four other senators wrote in a letter to Trump Friday and released Monday. “India is the world’s largest democracy and therefore holds a position of importance on the world stage, making the ongoing violations more disturbing.”
Kennedy was joined by Sens. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and James Lankford, R-Okla. The lawmakers noted that more than 10,000 organizations have lost their licenses to operate in the country since Modi took office in 2014.
“The United States has served as an example of religious liberty for the entire world ever since its founding,” they wrote. “These principles underlie the essence of what it means to be American. Even more importantly, the freedom to practice one’s own religious beliefs underlies the essence of what it means to be human and live in a democracy.”
Modi’s ruling party is using the law to defang nonprofits that oppose its agenda. The legislation, passed in 2010, allows the government to interdict an organization’s access to foreign donations if the nonprofit is engaged in “any activities detrimental to the national interest.” Nonprofits that oppose Modi’s economic policies have been targeted under the law, as have religious groups. And the reasoning behind targeting the missionaries reflects Indian leadership’s disagreement with the senators about the role of religious beliefs in a democracy.
“It is part of the colonial civilizing mission still continuing,” an Indian academic who supports Modi told the Guardian. “They use health and education as outreach, but harvesting of souls is their primary activity.”
Other countries have followed India in passing legislation designed to hamper or end activism funded by American donors. Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law in 2015 giving him the authority to declare certain non-governmental organizations “undesirable” and either jail or fine Russian citizens who work with the nonprofits. That law was signed with an eye on undercutting anti-Putin groups in the run-up to the 2016 elections, according to human rights observers.
“It is primarily targeted against Russian activists and Russia civic groups,” a Human Rights Watch official told Interfax. “It aims to cut them off from international partners.”
More recently, Hungary’s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban has pushed legislation that would undercut foreign-funded nonprofits, including a major university in the country. He built public support for the campaign by accusing progressive Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros of running “a mafia-like” web of organizations.
The State Department criticized those laws, but Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has warned publicly that the United States cannot push human rights with equal force in all circumstances.
“If we [demand] too heavily that others must adopt this value that we’ve come to over a long history of our own, it really creates obstacles to our ability to advance our national security interests or our economic interests,” Tillerson told State Department staff in May. “It doesn’t mean that we leave those values on the sidelines. It doesn’t mean that we don’t advocate for and aspire to freedom and human dignity and the freedom of the people the world over. We do. We will always have that on our shoulder, everywhere we go.”
