Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) lawmaker Rajendra Pal Gautam earlier this month attended an event in which over 10,000 people converted from Hinduism to Buddhism.
Days after the mass-conversion, a video surfaced of the event in which a Buddhist monk leading the conversion was seeking denunciation of Hinduism and Hindu deities from the converts. Repeating after him, converts denounced their former religion and its deities. They termed Hinduism as “harmful to the progress of humans”.
Gautam resigned from his ministerial post after controversy erupted over such comments and AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal was termed as “anti-Hindu” — in the run-up to the Gujarat elections where AAP is trying hard to embarrass the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
A police complaint has been filed against Gautam and he has been questioned by Delhi Police on the subject. While it might appear here that it’s the mass conversion that has irked people, it’s not the conversion but comments on Hinduism. However, the incident has brought the spotlight on religious conversion in India which has been a polarising subject in recent years.
Conversions or mass conversions are not unheard of in India. One of the most well-known cases of mass conversions was led by one of the most revered Indians — Bhim Rao Ambedkar. On October 14, 1956, Ambedkar converted to Buddhism along with around 3,65,000 followers. He said converting to Buddhism was “the only method for Dalits to denounce the caste system and to gain equality”.
Despite conversion being endorsed by Ambedkar, who chaired the Drafting Committee of the Constituent Assembly, lawmakers have regulated conversions for decades. While several Indian states have enacted laws regulating conversions, unsuccessful attempts have also been made at the federal level as well.
Laws on religious conversions in India
Laws on religious conversions have existed in India since colonial days. A number of princely states had laws regulating conversions, such as Raigarh in present-day Madhya Pradesh.
A common theme through the years in laws regulating conversions has been to check conversions through allurement of underprivileged or vulnerable groups, such as Dalits and tribals.
The most well-known law regulating conversions in the colonial period was in Raigarh, formally known as the Raigarh State Conversion Act of 1936. It required the person to submit a conversion application to a designated officer. The law was made in the context of colonialism and one of the stated reasons at the time was to check foreign influences in princely state that might come with conversions by Christian missionaries.
Spreading Christianity was, of course, central to the colonialism. ‘God’ has been cited as one of the “three Gs” driving colonial zeal, with the other two being ‘Gold’ and ‘Glory’.
Madhya Pradesh was also the first state to regulate conversions after Independence.
In 1967, Madhya Pradesh Dharma Swatantrata Adhiniyam —translated as Madhya Pradesh Religious Freedom Act— was enacted. It required a person seeking to convert another person to report it to the District Magistrate within a set period of time.
In 1968, Odisha —then Orrisa— enacted the Orrisa Freedom of Religion Act.
Supreme Court on laws regulating conversions
Both the MP and Odisha laws were challenged in the high courts. While the MP High Court upheld the MP law, the Odisha High Court found its state’s law unconstitutional. Ultimately, the decisions of both the high courts on both laws were challenged in the Supreme Court.
In 1977, the Supreme Court ruled that both the laws were constitutional.
The Supreme Court held that Article 25 of the Constitution of India, which provides the right to conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion, “does not grant right to convert other person to one’s own religion but to transmit or spread one’s religion by an exposition of its tenets”.
“What is freedom for one is freedom for the other in equal measure and there can, therefore, be no such thing as a fundamental right to convert any person to one’s own religion,” said the 1977 Supreme Court judgement available on its website, which further adds that laws by MP and Odisha fell into the “public order” exception of right to freedom of religion.
Article 25 states that the freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion is “subject to public order, morality and health”.
List of laws on religious conversions
Since the Supreme Court upheld the laws in Madhya Pradesh and Odisha, several other states have enacted laws regulating religious conversions. These laws are:
The Arunachal Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act, 1978
The law prohibits “conversion from one religious faith to any other religious faith by use of force or inducement or by fraudulent means and for matters connected therewith”.
Gujarat Freedom of Religion Act, 2003
The law was amended in 2021 to bring conversion through marriage into the ambit of the law. The amendment marks the evolved focus on the discourse of conversion.
“Section 3 of the 2021 Act now prohibits fraudulent conversions by marriage, with the various offences under the Act listed as cognizable and non-bailable in Section 7,” notes Supreme Court Observer.
It has been challenged in the Supreme Court and a decision is pending.
Chhattisgarh Religion Freedom (Amendment) Act, 2006
The law makes it mandatory to seek the approval of District Magistrate (DM) 30 days before the conversion.
Himachal Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act, 2006
The BJP-led Himachal Pradesh government in 2022 passed an amendment to include mass conversions into the ambit of the existing law first enacted in 2006. It bars mass conversions through “through force or allurement” and marriages for the purposes of conversion.
People seeking conversions will have to give a month’s notice to DM.
Jharkhand Freedom of Religion Act, 2017
No person shall convert or attempt to convert, either directly or otherwise, any person from one religion or religious faith to another by the use of force or by allurement or by any fraudulent means, nor shall any person abet any such conversion, according to the law.
It adds that permission for conversion needs to be sought from the DM.
Uttarakhand Freedom of Religious Act, 2018
The law makes offences non-bailable. Like other states, the DM needs to be informed 30 days in advance.
Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Ordinance, 2020
The bill seeks to “to provide freedom of religion by prohibition of conversion from one religion to another by misrepresentation, force, undue influence, coercion, allurement or by any fraudulent means or by marriage and for the matters incidental thereto”.
The ordinance was turned into a law in 2021 after a bill was passed in the state legislature.
The law makes marriages null and void if their sole purpose is the conversion.
A notice needs to be submitted to the DM two months before the conversion.
The Karnataka Protection of Right to Freedom of Religion Act, 2021
Under the law, the DM has to be notified 30 days before the conversion. The notice would be made public, and, if a complaint is received that the conversion violates the laid down norms, the DM will scrutinise the case.
The Haryana Prevention of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2022
The offences under the law are cognisable and non-bailable.
The law also makes concealing religion for marriage a punishable offence. Like other laws enacted in BJP-ruled states, a prior notice before conversion to the district administration is required.
Religious laws and the Constitution
The freedom of religion in the Constitution has usually been understood as a freedom to convert but, as mentioned earlier, the Supreme Court has ruled that’s not the case.
Another ground for opposition to the recently-introduced conversion laws in states like Uttar Pradesh and Haryana is that it violates a person’s right to privacy —stemming from the 2017 Puttaswamy judgement— through the requirement of mandatory notices to district administrations.
Supreme Court Advocate K V Muthu Kumar says the laws introduced lately do not violate the right to privacy.
“The 2017 Puttaswamy verdict was a very general verdict and not specific to the issue of conversions,” says Kumar.
He further tells Outlook that, contrary to some arguments, religious conversion is not explicitly private and therefore the question of violation of one’s privacy does not arise.
“When you convert from one religion to another, you notify it in your public records, as your changed identity has to reflect in all your records. Therefore, the conversion is not a private affair as a public notification accompanies it,” says Kumar.
Shailendra Kumar Gupta brings focus on another aspect of the opposition to laws regulating conversions.
“Several groups in Islam and Christianity consider it their duty to spread their religion and convert people. They consider proselytism fundamental to their religion. They therefore oppose laws on conversions,” says Gupta, Professor, Faculty of Law, Banaras Hindu University (BHU).
On the issue of the violation of right to privacy, Gupta tells Outlook, “The advance notice required to be given to district administration is understood to be a ‘reasonable restriction’. From the point of view of the state, a time period is essential to check if there is any force of financial allurement behind conversion. One might argue that 30 days is a long time for it and it might be reduced, say, to 15 days, but it would likely be held as a ‘reasonable restriction’.”
Ideas behind laws for religious conversions
Religious conversions and laws to regulate conversions stem from the social realities and anxieties of the day.
In colonial India and early decades following Independence, it was the need to protect against the perceived Christian evangelical zeal that marked the colonial period. In the last few years, particularly since the rise of BJP in 2014, laws have been enacted to protect womenfolk from what’s perceived as ‘love jihad’ — though none of the laws mention this term.
Conversions have also often been a response to social realities. The mass conversion that Ambedkar led was to free the Dalits of the caste inequalities that he felt plagued them within the folds of Hinduism. In decades since, there have been incidents where people have converted after facing discrimination or violence, such as the mass conversion reported after the gang rape and murder of a Dalit woman in Hathras in Uttar Pradesh.
A paper titled Caste Related Violence In India Vis A Vis Right Of Religion And Conversion Under Indian Constitution With Judicial Pronouncements in The Indian Journal of Political Science notes three other reasons for conversions:
- Polygamy prevalent in Islam
- To get rid of unwanted marital ties
- To get reservation benefits
In laws regulating conversions in recent years, driven often by the notion of ‘love jihad’, the social group at the centre is often women, as opposed to tribals and Dalits earlier. However, both the cases, argues Laura Dudley Jenkins of University of Cincinnati, are rooted in the perception that these groups make their decision not by themselves but under some influence.
“In contemporary India, government assessments of the legitimacy of conversions tend to rely on two assumptions: first, that people who convert in groups may not have freely chosen conversion, and second, that certain groups are particularly vulnerable to being lured into changing their religion,” notes Jenkins in her paper Legal Limits om Religious Conversion in India.
Jenkins also addresses preoccupation in recent years of women’s conversion. The idea of ‘love jihad’, which appears to be a driving factor of conversion laws in recent years, basically refers to the perception that Muslim men marry non-Muslim women —mainly Hindu women— with the sole idea of converting them to Islam.
“Religious leaders seem particularly preoccupied with saving women from traditional practices via conversion or, conversely, from conversion itself...This may be due to the constitutive role of women in religious and national communities, including reproducing the community, both biologically and ideologically, by giving birth to and training the children, and in some cases serving as tangible boundary markers of the community through distinctive dress or religious roles,” notes Jenkins.
