Articles
Two strategic pullbacks by the BJP
Opinion | Articles | John Dayal | 03-Sep-2026
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s two pullbacks in August of high-profile bills it had every intention of passing may have seemed a rainbow in a sky otherwise made dark and gloomy by unabated acts of violence and systemic persecution of Christians in states such as Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. On Aug. 12, the federal government sent the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment (FCRA) Bill, 2026 to a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) for a detailed examination and wider consultation rather than force it through the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament, as originally planned.
Then, on the morning of Aug. 31, hours before the Goa State Assembly’s monsoon session opened, Chief Minister Pramod Sawant met his Christian legislators and quietly shelved the Goa Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Bill, 2026, within a week of his Cabinet clearing it.There are many in the Church, and some in the non-governmental sector, who read these pullbacks, not unreasonably, as evidence that the pro-Hindu party has heard the Christian community’s cry and stepped back. The FCRA episode was not a rearguard action fought mainly by small Christian-majority states in the North-East. A ten-member delegation of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) had also met Federal Home Minister Amit Shah, with strong representation from Protestant and evangelical churches. The campaign carried an international dimension too, with US Congressman Riley Moore describing the amendments as a clear attack against Christians, warning they could strain India-US ties. The CBCI's standing links to the Vatican and Caritas Internationalis meant the Bill was being discussed in Rome and Geneva as much as in Delhi.
Goa’s retreat drew on a narrower but equally concerted mobilization with the Archdiocese of Goa and Daman’s Council for Social Justice and Peace and the Catholic Association of Goa objecting specifically to the Bill’s use of "allurement" — a category so elastic that ordinary charitable work, and even routine parish life, could be read into it. The opposition Congress and the regional outfit, Goa Forward Party, amplified the same objections politically, but it was the Church's own institutional weight, meeting a set of minority legislators already uneasy about the Bill, that gave Sawant the cover to pause it. Michael Lobo, one of those legislators, framed the pause as procedural rather than principled: the Bill needed to be studied thoroughly, and all stakeholders needed to be taken into confidence.
That is not a renunciation, but a mere buying of time, while the Bill remains in the government's possession, cleared by the Cabinet. It can be tabled in a later session with no further procedural step required. The FCRA retreat, though larger in scale, follows the same pattern as the federal government has not withdrawn the Bill; it has parked it in a committee that must report by the first week of Parliament’s winter session, giving the amendments a second life on a timetable of the government's choosing. The FCRA Bill’s most contentious feature, a government-appointed “designated authority” empowered to take custody of assets built with foreign funds once an organization’s FCRA registration lapses or is canceled, remains intact in the text before that committee.
The FCRA Rules, 2026, which tighten compliance and reporting requirements under the existing 2010 Act, were notified on June 22 and are already in force, wholly untouched by the parliamentary maneuver around the amending Bill itself. The pressure that produced the JPC referral came not only from the churches but from the BJP's own coalition partners in the northeast region: Mizoram Chief Minister Lalduhoma met Shah on Aug. 6 to convey his community's concerns, and Nagaland Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio urged the federal government to allow detailed parliamentary scrutiny. It would be a serious misreading to extend either retreat to the wider architecture this project has followed since 2003, and which quickened sharply after 2020.
Thirteen states now carry their own Freedom of Religion Act, regardless of which party currently governs there. Goa’s neighbor state, Maharashtra, brought the state’s own anti-conversion legislation into force on Aug. 28, three days before Sawant blinked. Nothing in Goa's decision reopens that question in Maharashtra. More tellingly, these laws survive changes of government: Karnataka’s 2022 law, passed under a BJP government, remains in force under the current Congress administration; Jharkhand's 2017 Act survives under a regional secular party’s government; while in Himachal Pradesh, the law — first passed in 2006, replaced with a stricter version in 2019, and amended in 2022 — stands untouched by the Congress government that succeeded the BJP there.
West Bengal offers the same lesson from the opposite direction, that of a state newly won rather than merely held. Since the BJP formed the state government after May's Assembly election, church bodies have documented a sustained pattern of intimidation untouched by anything decided in New Delhi or in Panaji, the capital of Goa. The Bengal Christian Council's founding member Herod Mullick has described a deliberate sequence: Christians attacked first, false conversion cases filed against them afterwards, and provocative videos circulated to shape opinion before any inquiry can establish the facts.That is what the Hindu nationalist doctrine looks like when it reaches a village. No BJP government, federal or state, has moved against Ghar Wapsi, the reconversion of Christians and Muslims to Hinduism conducted using the same inducements the anti-conversion laws claim to prohibit when the direction runs the other way. This confirms what the laws have always targeted: not conversion as such, but its direction.
The Supreme Court’s judgment in Rev. Stanislaus v. State of Madhya Pradesh in 1977, which held that Article 25's right to propagate religion does not extend to converting another person, remains the doctrinal foundation for every one of these laws. But the Court's own long silence on the constitutional challenge to that body of legislation, by the CBCI and others pending since 2020, continues undisturbed by anything that happened this month.The pitch of this project has scarcely varied since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ascent to power in 2014, and periodically since Gujarat in 2002, when the state witnessed anti-Muslim violence under his watch as the chief minister.
The two latest tactical pauses, in New Delhi and Panaji, however welcome to the communities and church bodies that forced them, are not a change of direction.
(The Author is a Sr. Journalist, a Writer, and a right activist, Views expressed in the article are personal)