[Already, 15,000 of the 145,000 Indian children regularly receiving services through Compassion International have been severed from the programs. Beginning on March 10, the sponsors will be contacted individually, at the rate of 2,500 per day, and asked to transfer their sponsorships from Indian children to children from other countries.]
By Ellen Barry and Suhasini Raj
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Pramod Dass, the director
of Bethesda Charitable Endeavors, one of the 500 Indian
partners of Compassion
International that will have to shut down operations.
Credit Poras Chaudhary
for The New York Times
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NEW
DELHI — India’s crackdown on
foreign aid will claim its most prominent casualty this month, as a
Colorado-based Christian charity that is one of India’s biggest donors closes
its operations here after 48 years, informing tens of thousands of children
that they will no longer receive meals, medical care or tuition payments.
The shutdown of the charity, Compassion
International, on suspicion of engaging in religious conversion, comes as
India, a rising economic power with a swelling spirit of nationalism, curtails
the flow of foreign money to activities it deems “detrimental to the national
interest.”
More than 11,000 nongovernmental
organizations have lost their licenses to accept foreign funds since Prime
Minister Narendra Modi took office in 2014. Major Western funders — among them
George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the National Endowment for
Democracy — have been barred from transferring funds without permission from
Indian security officials.
But few have been as vocal about their
struggle as Compassion International, which solicits donations through its
$38-a-month “sponsor a child” program and distributes them through
church-affiliated service centers. It has repeatedly ranked as India’s largest
single foreign donor, transferring around $45 million a year.
Its executives vehemently deny the
government’s allegation that it is funding religious conversions, and say India
has given them no opportunity to rebut the accusation. Instead, they say they
found themselves in murky back-channel negotiations with a representative of
the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or R.S.S., a right-wing Hindu ideological
group that is closely connected with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party but has
no official role in governance.
“You think, ‘Wow, am I negotiating with the
government or am I negotiating with an ideological movement that is fueling the
government?’” said Santiago Mellado, Compassion International’s chief executive
officer, in a telephone interview from the charity’s offices in Colorado
Springs. He added that a briefing on the situation would be submitted to the
Trump administration this week.
A spokesman for India’s Ministry of Home
Affairs, which oversees regulation of foreign charities, refused repeated
requests for comment on the case.
A Foreign Ministry official, speaking on
condition of anonymity, following diplomatic protocol, said Compassion
International’s partners were violating Indian law by engaging in religious
activities, and that the organization refused a government offer to re-register
as a religious organization, which would have allowed it to continue its work
in India.
Religious charities, which make up half of
the dozen top international donors to India, are watching the case closely, Mr.
Mellado said. “What we hear from our friends in India is that it would be
tragic if they were successful in shutting down Compassion, because that would
leave other ministries very vulnerable,” Mr. Mellado said. “They are feeling
like they’re next.”
India has long had a law regulating the use
of foreign aid, but Mr. Modi’s government has applied it in rigorous fashion,
canceling the registrations of more than 10,000 nongovernmental groups, mostly
small ones, in 2015.
That summer, income tax investigators began
raiding offices affiliated with Compassion International, apparently seeking
evidence that funds were being used to convert Indian families.
Sam Jebagnanam, a field officer based in
Chennai, described the searches as “harrowing,” with staff members questioned
through the night and forbidden from leaving the office, summoning a lawyer or
ordering food.
The investigators, he said, focused their
questions on a vacation Bible school funded by the charity. Seventy-six percent
of the children served by the program are Hindu, and 28 percent are Christian,
he said.
At another raid, he said, a top executive was
interrogated under oath at 3 a.m.
“They kept asking him, ‘Why did you have a
spiritual component to the program? What do you do in the area of spiritual
development?’” he said. “We said we teach moral values; we do not force anyone
into religion.”
Compassion International executives learned
early last year, from an item in an Indian newspaper, that their group had been
added to the list of organizations whose transfers required prior permission by
the Ministry of Home Affairs, said Stephen Oakley, Compassion’s general
counsel.
By summer, $600,000 in donations was stuck in
an Indian bank account awaiting permission that did not come. In November, two
of the group’s main affiliates — in Chennai and Kolkata — were denied
authorization to use foreign funds.
In the United States, Mr. Mellado was
pressing, with an increasing sense of urgency, for an opportunity to plead his
case with Indian officials.
But the only interlocutors they could find
were through unofficial channels. In October, a Washington-based representative
of the R.S.S., Shekhar Tiwari, reached out to John Prabhudoss, who heads an
umbrella organization of Indian-American Christians and has a long association
with Compassion International and its leaders, Mr. Prabhudoss said.
Mr. Mellado said he was puzzled by the
indirect outreach, but decided to give it a try.
“We are trying to navigate through
understanding of the dynamics on the Indian side,” he said. “We understand that
the B.J.P. and the R.S.S. are tied together somehow, so it seems to us that we
also need to be talking to the R.S.S.”
Through Mr. Prabhudoss, Mr. Tiwari put
forward a proposal: The government might view Compassion International more
favorably if the charity routed a portion of its $45 million in annual
charitable donations away from churches and through non-Christian aid groups,
including Hindu ones.
“They were asking me, ‘How do you think we
can solve this problem?’” Mr. Tiwari said. “I told them, instead of having all
your partners Christian, have some Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, Sikh
organizations.”
Mr. Prabhudoss and Mr. Mellado both said that
the suggestion was to fund R.S.S. affiliated organizations, though Mr. Tiwari
denies making such a suggestion. They rejected the idea, which they viewed as
“inappropriate,” Mr. Mellado said.
An official from India’s Ministry of External
Affairs denied that the R.S.S. representative had any role in the government’s
actions, calling the discussion “totally extraneous to the law enforcement
action.”
Things went downhill quickly after that. In
early January, Mr. Oakley, the general counsel, went to New Delhi to plead his
case to India’s foreign secretary, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, in a meeting also
attended by the second-ranked United States diplomat in India.
It was the first and last meeting between the
charity’s leaders and government officials, and Mr. Oakley described it as
bitterly contentious.
As it came to an end, he said, a Home
Ministry official suggested that Compassion International re-register its
Indian partners as religious entities, a step that the charity’s legal team
discouraged, saying it would lead to further paralysis.
“It was a very disingenuous offer,” Mr.
Oakley said. “Either he didn’t know that was legally impossible, or it was an
offer designed to end the meeting.”
Last week, word went out to the group’s 500
Indian partners that they would have to shut down their operations. Among them
is Bethesda Charitable Endeavors, which funds a community center in a town
called Haldwani, in the Himalayan foothills.
The center’s employees have cleared out four
of their nine rented rooms, and 250 children have been told not to return to
the center.
Pramod Dass, who directs the charity,
organized a morose little closing ceremony last week in his Delhi office.
“I was heartbroken, because for the past six
months, we were living in hope that something would happen,” he said. “Maybe a
miracle.”
Already, 15,000 of the 145,000 Indian
children regularly receiving services through Compassion International have
been severed from the programs. Beginning on March 10, the sponsors will be
contacted individually, at the rate of 2,500 per day, and asked to transfer
their sponsorships from Indian children to children from other countries.
“That process is irreversible,” Mr. Mellado
said. “We would have to start all over in India, and for 145,000 children, it
will take years.”
Priya Saxena, 13, is among the children who
have been asked not to return to the community center in Haldwani.
Over the four years she has been attending
the center every day after school, she said, she has learned to speak and write
English, received vaccinations for typhoid and eaten regular high-protein
meals.
Her father, a vegetable vendor, earns a
monthly salary of about 1000 rupees, or around $16.
“Now I do not know what the future holds for
me,” she said. “I hoped to become a doctor. But now that we are told we will no
longer have sponsors to see us through the education, I don’t know what will
happen.”
She added: “This place taught me to have a
life. It is finished now.”
