For years, discussions about Falun Gong were framed largely as a human-rights issue inside China.
That frame is no longer sufficient.
Official U.S. reports, criminal prosecutions and independent research now document Chinese government activity aimed at critics and religious or spiritual communities outside China's territory.
The modern term for this is transnational repression.
And viewed from India, it raises a straightforward question:
When another government's campaign against its critics reaches another country, whose sovereignty is actually at stake?
What is Falun Dafa?
Falun Dafa, or Falun Gong, is a spiritual practice of meditation and five exercises, with teachings centred on Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance. The Chinese Communist Party began a nationwide campaign against it in 1999. Independent organisations including Freedom House have documented detention, torture, censorship and state propaganda directed against practitioners since then. Freedom House
What is transnational repression?
The U.S. State Department defines China's overseas activity as including intimidation or reprisals directed against people outside the PRC, including ethnic minorities, spiritual and religious practitioners, journalists, students and dissidents.
Its human-rights reporting cites tactics including physical and digital threats, coercion through relatives, surveillance and abuse of international institutions. U.S. State Department
Freedom House describes China's transnational-repression apparatus as the world's most extensive and identifies Falun Gong among the communities targeted.
Falun Gong is not merely a theoretical example
In 2024, John Chen and Lin Feng pleaded guilty in the United States to acting as unregistered agents of the PRC and bribing an individual they believed to be an IRS official in a scheme targeting a Falun Gong-run organisation.
The Justice Department said they acted at the direction of the Chinese government. Chen was subsequently sentenced to 20 months in prison. U.S. DOJ
The U.S. State Department's 2023 religious-freedom report also cited the criminal case concerning an alleged Chinese police station in New York and noted that a defendant had allegedly assisted the PRC by participating in counterprotests against Falun Gong practitioners.
Again, allegations in a complaint should not be confused with proven facts at trial.
But the Chen-Feng guilty pleas remove any ambiguity from that particular case: PRC-directed activity targeting Falun Gong did occur on U.S. territory.
Why call this a sovereignty issue?
Transnational repression is often described primarily through the experience of its victims.
That is understandable, but incomplete.
If an overseas government can intimidate residents, manipulate institutions, pressure venues, interfere with journalists or direct covert activity in another country, the host state's authority is also implicated.
The relevant question therefore becomes larger than:
Do we agree with the targeted group?
It becomes:
Can foreign political red lines be exported into another country's democratic space?
India's interest
India manages a complicated relationship with China.
Diplomatic engagement is unavoidable and often necessary.
Security considerations surrounding visiting leaders are also legitimate.
But diplomatic engagement need not mean importing another government's categories of acceptable and unacceptable speech.
If a Falun Gong practitioner is acting lawfully in Bengaluru, Delhi or Mumbai, the relevant legal framework should be Indian law.
If a journalist accredited in India wants to ask a question that Beijing dislikes, that journalist's access should be governed by India's accreditation and security standards, not the ideological preferences of the government being questioned.
That principle applies whether the subject is Falun Gong, Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, dissidents or any other politically sensitive subject.
India does not need to become anti-China to defend that boundary.
It merely needs to remain India.