At Christmas of all times, India puts the reins on the internationally recognized religious order of Mother Teresa.

The Ministry of the Interior of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government refused on Boxing Day to renew their permit to receive foreign payments.

The Catholic organization operates more than 240 orphanages and hospices on the subcontinent.

Christoph Hein

Business correspondent for South Asia / Pacific based in Singapore.

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Dominic Gomes, Vicar General of the Diocese of Calcutta, the former place of life and work of Mother Teresa, described the Ministry of Interior's actions as a “brutal Christmas present for the poorest of the poor”.

The sisters supported the leprosy sufferers and those marginalized from society.

More than 22,000 people are affected by the Indian government's decision.

Founder Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, and Pope Francis canonized her in 2016.

The care of the Missionaries of Charity in India was recognized by Rome in 1950.

More than 5000 sisters work for the order in 130 countries around the world.

They run more than 700 homes for the terminally ill and outcast.

Again and again attacks on Christians

"The Indian government is withdrawing the status under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) for the charitable organization Missionaries of Charity, which was founded by Mother Teresa," warned Western diplomats in New Delhi. At the end of October, Indian officials extended the due renewal of the sisters' license to receive foreign assistance to December 31st. But then there were "unwanted entries" in the application. As a result, they rejected the sisters' application for renewal of the license on December 25th because the requirements were not met.

In the Indian media it was said that there were "irregularities in the audit".

On the day after Christmas, the Indian Ministry of the Interior announced: "The Missionaries of Charity have not submitted a request to review this refusal of the extension." Officially, the nuns have not been officially banned from work.

But they are largely dependent on donations and support from abroad.

"Lifeline for the needy severed"

The Hindu newspaper reports that the Order received around $ 750 million from abroad in India in the past fiscal year (March 31). “Today a lifeline for the needy has been severed, because the funds for all this work for the marginalized come from generous people from all over the world. We see the cutting of foreign funds as a hard blow to their efforts to reach the poorest, the orphans, the disabled, the addicts, the old and the unserved, the sick, the abandoned and the dying ”, criticized the Catholic Association of Bengal.

The Modi government's approach is not new: In the past, the Hindu nationalists have repeatedly used alleged misconduct in filing applications or keeping accounts against foreign foundations and organizations, such as Greenpeace and Amnesty International.

Bank accounts of unwelcome non-governmental organizations have been frozen.

Support for modes

The action against the Catholic aid organization, however, has a further dimension: After the attacks on Muslims, which have been tolerated again and again, Christians in India are increasingly being targeted by radical Hindus.

In the largest democracy on earth, there are repeated attacks on churches, priests and believers.

Last year, the US state commission for international religious freedom classified India for the first time since 2004 as a “country of particular concern”.

Members of violent Hindu groups disrupted two schools' Christmas celebrations on Saturday.

One day later, vandals destroyed a Jesus sculpture in a church.

Christians hold a share of around 2.3 percent of the Indian population of just under 1.4 billion people.

The comments on the decision in New Delhi by no means take all sides for the sisters and their charitable work: Many warn that their real, veiled goal is the proselytizing of the Hindus, against which one must now defend oneself. The sisters had only just been charged in Gujarat, Modi's home state, for forcing Hindu girls into the Catholic faith. Such allegations are “obviously wrong. They confuse everyone's mind because of their unbelievability, ”Gomes now explained.

At first there was confusion about the use of the accounts of the Catholic helpers. “The Home Office has not frozen any missionaries' accounts. The State Bank of India has announced that the missionaries themselves have applied to the SBI to freeze their accounts, ”the ministry said. The Order later confirmed this view: After the license was rejected, it had instructed all of its homes not to use the organization's foreign exchange accounts until "the matter was settled".

The opposition Trinamool Congress then declared that the government had urged the nuns to issue such a statement in order to "limit the damage".

Mamata Banerjee, the Prime Minister of the state of West Bengal with its capital Calcutta, had previously spoken out publicly against the Modi government: “Shocked to hear that the Union Ministry frozen all bank accounts of Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity in India at Christmas! “She wrote on Twitter.

“22,000 patients and employees are left without food and medicine.

The law comes first, but humanitarian efforts must not be compromised. "