(UCA News) — There is something quietly damning about the priorities a government reveals when it thinks the cost will be borne by people with no voice.

In India today, millions of families wake up wondering whether their cooking gas will last the month, whether the road to the nearest town will survive another monsoon, or whether the electricity will hold long enough for their children to finish studying.

These are not political abstractions. They are the weight of an ordinary day for an enormous number of people, and they represent the most honest test of whether a government is earning its mandate.

Yet the Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP)-led government’s most visible energy in recent years has flowed somewhere else entirely.

Anti-conversion laws now blanket more than half the country’s population. The Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) has been squeezed repeatedly since 2020 — sub-grants banned, administrative costs capped, and reporting requirements multiplied — creating a bureaucratic maze that has strangled thousands of organizations doing quiet, unglamorous work in places the state rarely bothers to reach.

More than 20,000 FCRA licenses have been canceled since 2014. The groups carrying the heaviest weight of this crackdown are, by every credible account, disproportionately Christian — organizations that for decades ran orphanages, leprosy clinics, tribal schools, and HIV support programmes in villages where government services are little more than a rumor.

Supporters call it transparency. Foreign money, they argue, should not fund activities that disturb social harmony or nudge people toward changing their........

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