The topic of anti-conversion laws in India is deeply intertwined with the country’s social, cultural, and constitutional fabric. Dr. Justice S. Muralidhar, Hon’ble Chief Justice (Retd.) of the Orissa High Court, offers valuable reflections from a panel discussion held in New Delhi on 28 February 2025. His insights provide a comprehensive lens to examine these laws, their historical foundations, and the challenges they pose to India’s pluralistic ethos. He highlights broader issues of identity, religious freedom, and social inequality, which are central to understanding the implications of such legislation.

In several countries, you have assertions of nationhood, of nationalism, and its concomitant concepts of patriotism as to who is a national? Who is anti-national? All these are highly contested and have become subjective terms. It also explains why the very concept of nationhood has become highly contested in recent times, leading to internal turmoil in several parts of the world. Even at home, the major engagement of social media groups, WhatsApp universities, is around the question of nationalism, patriotism, and rashtravad.

Assertions of identity have also resulted in the marginalization of communities, rendering the very existence vulnerable. We live in an age where the world over, there is an increased polarization fueled in no small measure by social media. There is considerable churning as a result of the clash of cultures, values and choices. Divisions are also there among communal caste, class, geographical, linguistic, and social lives. A lot of blood has been spilled in the name of religion throughout the history of mankind.

Fundamentalism, which is the antithesis of democracy, still captures the popular imagination. The voice of reason seems to get drowned out by the cacophony of WhatsApp forwards, likes and dislikes. The age of information overload has led to an absence of natural instinctive intelligence. In fact, there is a simultaneous effort at humanizing robots and robotizing humans. There are sufficient scientific and empirical studies to validate the proposition that the subcontinent of which we are a part of has a migrant population from the African continent and the West Asian nations. It appears that the subcontinent always had a rich diversity and plurality of population, which mingled and spread far and wide. This country has been a host to a variety of tribes, thousands of languages, some without a written script, and some eight major religious denominations, not to speak of numerous castes and subcastes. A Pew Research Centre survey in 2021 found that India's population is diverse as well as devout. Not only do most of the world's Hindu, Sikhs and Jains live in India, but it is also home to one of the largest Muslim populations, and to millions of Christians and Buddhists. It also noted that Indians see religious tolerance as a central part of who they are as a nation. Tolerance is a religious as well as a civic value. Indians are united in the view that respecting other religions is a very important part of what it means to be a member of their own religious community. We never were and cannot conceivably be an issue of one culture, one language,one religion. What makes us proudly Indian is diversity and plurality, and yet, we live in times of chaos, accusations of love jihad, attacks on religious minorities, and castes.

Our youth cannot intermarry. Caste stratification is in every religious denomination, and it is a grave reminder that caste indeed is the ‘elephant in the room’. Historically, we have responded in a variety of ways to the diversity of religions in this country. Emperor Ashoka, in his 12th century rock edict, made an appeal not only to tolerate all religious sects, but also to develop a spirit of great respect toward them. In medieval India, religious tolerance and freedom of worship marked the same under Emperor Akbar. He had a number of Hindus as his ministers and forbade forcible conversions and abolished the Jizyah tax for non-Muslims. The most prominent evidence of his tolerance policy was the promulgation of Din-i-llahi or Divine Faith which had elements of both Muslim and Hindu faith. Even before Akbar, Babur had advised Humayun to shape religious prejudice, protect temples, preserve cows, and administer justice properly in his tradition. Dara Shikoh, the son of Aurangzeb, translated the Upanishads into Persian. Some of the early Christian missionaries also took upon themselves the task of translating some of the Hindu scriptures. Scholar Chaturvedi Badarinath, who is a philosopher, in his book Dharma - Hinduism, and Religions in India, speaks about Roberto de Nobili, an Italian Jesuit missionary who arrived to India in the 17th century with regards to Catholicism-Hinduism dialogue. In complete opposition to the mass conversion policy of St. Xavier, they nobly took a different approach characterized by three assumptions. 1. Christianity would make no headway in India, unless the high caste Hindu and Brahmins, in particular, were reached.

2. They would not have really a chance unless it was offered in a spiritual idiom of India.

3. The prevalent social distinctions were not religious in nature and therefore must be respected just as social distinctions in Europe would be respected there.

These three issues have persisted in the dialogue between Christianity and Hinduism to the present day. This has happened not just with Christianity but with other religions as well.

India has also had its share of non-believers such as Charvaka, or the Lokayata school. In Sanskrit, it translates into worldly-wise, and they were materialists who rejected ideas like afterlife, karma, moksha, as well as the authority of the sacred scriptures like the Vedas. Historian Rajmohan Gandhi notes that during the European rule, South Indians shared a desire to end elite-rule and bring social equality to native populations. This sentiment is echoed in the Telugu poetry by Gurajada Apparao, and I quote, “Never does land mean clay and sand, the people the people, they are the land”. More than a thousand years ago before Apparao, Kaniyan Pungundranar’s Tamil work, “All the universe is our place, and everyone in this universe is our people” expressed a similar idea. The Kannada poet, Basava, further demolished any justification for inequality in his verses from the 12th century.

Who defines what is a minority and what is a majority? According to Badrinath, these categories were fashioned by the British Colonial rulers. He points out that there are several narrow winding tortuous paths leading to the prison of history. In the political context of modern India, one such road is the given name ‘minority’. The Indian Constitution defines Indian Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists as minorities. Interestingly enough, when they drew up the Hindu code, Sikhs, and Jains were bracketed with Hindus despite them having a separate religious identity. This is built into Article 25 as well. Hindus constitute a vast majority of the population while Christians and Muslims are significantly fewer in number. Hence, the need to safeguard their interests to constitutional provisions. The terms ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ were thus introduced for the first time into the political and social vocabulary of India. Nevertheless, just as equality as a state of mind is infinitely more than tolerance, equality in order to be genuine must be free and support diversity of life and thought. Equality is not uniformity. It was in the name of uniformity of civilization that many countries of Europe justified violence. In this attempt at bringing a homogeneity, non-Brahminical traditions such as Jainism, Buddhism, Dravidian culture, and Adivasi history were ignored because such historical narratives had the potential to break the essentialized construction of the so-called Hindu India, during the colonial period. Class conflicts, the caste question, and gender inequalities were largely not touched upon. As late as the early decades of the 20th century, the narration was limited to the Hindu-Muslim binary and the glorification of the past and it’s the same way of projecting issues that continues to the present. Unfortunately, we find the controlled media in the country also harps on the Hindu-Muslim question and fails to recognize the composite nature of Indian culture, the plurality of its societies, and the diversities of its practices. There are so many religious practices that sit uncomfortably in the Constitution. For instance, we saw that the playout of the Sabarimala case, we find it being played out in the Haji Ali Dargah Mosque case, and then in Parsi women’s admission to the cemetery, and even in circumcision of women’s genitalia. There are all these issues which are now getting played out in the courts which bring us back to the question, as to how far religious practices are consistent with what we believe as constitutional values? Before delving further into the discussion on anti-conversion laws, it is important to acknowledge that, despite their stated objective of fostering social change, these laws have largely fallen short of achieving that goal. Constitution, as a legal document, they have succeeded in bringing about political change, perhaps even economic change, and maybe increasing opportunities of livelihoods for the underprivileged. However, even the Constitution as an instrument of social change has by and large been a work in progress. As a result, we’ve always had periods of Indian political and legal history where we find certain emancipated figures emerging who talk of a casteless, classless society like we talk of Narayana Guru. However, these are followed by large periods of regression where those very figures are then put on a pedestal and what they stood for is forgotten. So, whether you take the Buddha, or Narayana Guru, or any other religious figure you’ll find that the way we pedestalize them, iconize them, seems a way of escaping the rigors of what they propagated or preached as values. We found the easy route of pedestalizing people, including Mahatma Gandhi, and therefore we find that the kind of social change that we’re looking for through instruments of law or instruments like the Constitution is by and large failing us. Hence, every time in society we will find periods of regression. Now is one such period when we find that in our values, social values of plurality, diversity, we are regressing. We are becoming more and more intolerant. If you look at the number of honor killings that take place, the reaction that we have to inter-caste marriages, inter-faith marriages, it is very disturbing. Inequality persists even within religions, particularly in the form of untouchability. Notably, the practice of untouchability is one of only two acts explicitly defined as offences in the Indian Constitution. These are: the prohibition of forced labour (begar) under Article 23, and the abolition of untouchability under Article 17. Despite it being defined as an offense under the Constitution, we find untouchability is practiced widely and not just across the dominant religion, but across all religions. So, you will find stratifications within Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs. There are Dalit Christian churches in Kerala. Among Muslims, the Qureshis and the Saris can’t marry the Sheikhs and Pathans. You can’t marry up; you could marry down. Among the Sikhs, and I spent some time in Punjab as a judge and it came with a harsh reality that you know how the Bhapa Sikhs are treated differently from the Jat Sikhs and the Ravidas Sikhs. There are Gurudwaras where this discrimination is practiced. When we talk of India, the elephant in the room is certainly caste. The elephant in the room is certainly patriarchy. The elephant in the room is feudalism and that seems to cut across borders. I was surprised in 2004; I visited Lahore as part of a conference. There, when I was interacting with my contemporaries there, I came to understand that among the Muslims there are Thakurs, there are Rajputs. So, these denominations that we have gone into seem to define any religious identity that we may have. Hence, religious identity is superimposed on a caste identity. The caste identity is superimposed on a sub-caste. So, among Dalits, for instance, the Musahar will not marry the Doms. Ambedkar’s writings tell us what this great inequality really is, doesn't stop with the upper caste. It percolates down even to the lower caste in that so-called hierarchy. That is what he was reminding us of when he tabled the final draft of the Constitution— the social inequality. He was starkly alive to the fact that social inequality will not be met by having provisions in the Constitution. Unless we practice constitutional values, we will not be able to see the kind of change we want to see in society. In the 75 years of the Indian Constitution, I believe in our personal spheres, we have not practiced constitutional lives. We’ve comfortably led dichotomous lives. You have people holding public office but in their private sphere, they will continue to discriminate. The son or daughter of a famous politician will not allow an interfaith or interclass marriage. Politicians in the post-independence movement, public figures who held highest public offices, when it comes to their own family, their own internal affairs, will stick to the known so-called traditional path and be highly intolerant of so-called deviant behavior. Therefore, the testing time, testing ground for us is society and the personal sphere of the family. We may talk of egalitarianism, we may talk of women’s emancipation, we may talk of equality, liberty, dignity but how do we practice this in our personal sphere is the real testing point and I think that is where we have a lot of work to do for the present generation. The Constitution, of course, protects our rights and freedoms, but how do we practice those rights and freedoms?

Much has been written about all these anti-conversion laws. They must be seen for what they are. They are nothing but criminal laws. They define an offense and prescribe a punishment for the offense. This is not to bring about any great social change. This is not to bring about any social reflection or egalitarianism, far from it. State legislative assemblies using the power they have to enact laws on public order that is Entry One, List Two of the Constitution, Seventh Schedule, have enacted all these anti-conversion laws. The earliest being the 1967 laws that were enacted both in Madhya Pradesh and Odisha. And the validity of those laws was upheld up to the Supreme Court of India.The Supreme Court was of the view that the right to religious freedom under Article 25 does not include the right to convert. On that basis, we now have a series of anti-conversion laws in as many as nine states or maybe twelve states in the country. They have, in a sense, bettered the earlier anti-conversion laws by making them even more severe. What it tells us, on a reading of these laws is, it is not so much a law against forced conversions, but it is a law against freedom of choice. There is a presumption in all these laws that if a person, born into a certain religion, decides to embrace another religion, such a decision must be as a result of coercion, or force, or some kind of intimidation. This basic presumption explains why the law shifts the burden of proof onto the person who is charged with converting another against the person’s will. If you are charged under these laws the burden is on you to show that you did not use force, coercion, or intimidation. Clearly, the law is meant to target any choice not just a conversion which is made out of volition by a person who says, “I find these values of this religion more appealing to me”. Interestingly, Dalits have also become key targets, particularly because of the phenomenon of mass conversions, such as those witnessed at Dikshabhoomi. Dalits who now seek emancipation and who want to embrace Buddhism will now have to explain to a district magistrate why they are making that choice. They will have to announce to the whole world that they are exercising their choice to embrace a religion. The person who seeks conversion has to make a public notice. The District Magistrate also has to notify. It’s all become a public spectacle, something which is personal to a person. What is private has become public. We could reasonably argue that after the Puttaswamy Privacy Judgement, this kind of a law should not withstand legal scrutiny because it straightaway hits at the freedom of choice, freedom of privacy, and the choice of religion of course. But what goes along with religion? The choice of dress, the choice of food, the choice of prayer, all of that is hit. One’s personal choice is forced to become a public choice, and you are supposed to defend yourself publicly for the personal choice that you have made. That is what I think is the most pernicious aspect of these conversion laws. Second, who can complain about forced conversion? Only a person who has been a victim of a forced conversion should be asked to complain. But no, this makes any cousin, any relative, any person. As a result, you have vigilante groups monitor public notice boards at the Collector or Registrar’s offices, searching for declarations of intended interfaith marriages—which, in effect, serve as indirect indicators of individuals planning to convert. The result the is that individuals seeking to convert are subjected to public scrutiny and intimidation by non state actors and affects freedom to marry with accusations of love jihad and putting every inter interfaith under a scanner.

This leads to people having to run to the court in Habeas Corpus petitions to seek police protection. This has generated a certain kind of behavior which has encouraged vigilante groups and encouraged moral policing- And this is 2025, the 75th year of the Indian Constitution. By expanding the range of people who can be so-called “concerned” about conversion, we’ve subjected an already vulnerable population, as the law targets not just Dalits, but women and children. It takes away agency from women completely. The Hadiya case is a classic example—a twenty-four-year-old adult woman in Kerala had to explain herself before first the High Court and then before the Supreme Court on why she exercised her choice to marry a person who belonged to another faith and why did she choose to convert? The underlying presumption is that if you marry a person of another faith, it is only for the purposes of conversion. This is another major underlying premise which attacks all interfaith marriages and stands completely in contradiction to the Constitution of India.

Regarding conversion, what are you converting from and what are you converting into? These questions came home to me because I was associated with the Graham Staines commission of inquiry that went into the murder of Graham Staines in Orissa, that happened about three decades ago.

A large number of tribal populations were Christians. If you went to the tribal homes, you would find that among the pantheon of gods that they have, they would have their animistic gods, but they would also have a photo of Jesus Christ. Conversion was never fully converting out of something. Also, when you’re converting into something, you are also converting also into something i.e. religious conversion in India is rarely a complete departure from one’s previous identity and that’s the Indian flavor of the whole thing. The law presumes that if you have converted, you’ve abandoned something, and you’ve embraced something totally new, but that’s not the way Indians live their lives.

There is a triumvirate of religious shrines in Tamil Nadu—the Velankanni church, the Nagore Dargah, and the Sikkal Singaravelan. This is the Christian church, the Muslim Dargah, and the Hindu temple. As a child, I have done the pilgrimage of three places and till date, many Tamils will make a pilgrimage of all three places. This is the Indian way of how we embrace religions. We never convert from something completely. We don’t convert into something totally. We retain our freedom to practice the religion the way we like. Otherwise, how do you explain the Nadar Christians (Syrian Christians) who tie Mangal sutra in the church. They don’t abandon cultural practices. A large number of Muslim women in Bengal don’t wear the pardha (burqa), they wear saris. This Indian flavor of a lived life which embraces cultural aspects of various communities, that cannot now be wiped away and sought to be homogenized in this kind of a fashion.

If you are going to use a Criminal law and the most troubling aspect of the lesioned—state of criminal law is the last aspect when it is used to shift the burden of proof, requiring the accused to prove that he has not committed the crime and mirrors the logic found in many anti-terror laws.

The other aspect of the anti-conversion laws is the bail provisions. The twin condition that you have to demonstrate before a court that you’re prima facie innocent when you don’t have access to all the material the prosecution has, makes it doubly difficult for a person to obtain bail under the anti-conversion laws. As a result, the misuse of these laws can be rampant and is rampant.

I was given a collection of case studies, and I was astonished. I’ll share a few of them:

On 16th February 2025, Sister Sheila Savrimuthu, a nun and a lawyer organized a medical awareness camp in the public park in Indore, Madhya Pradesh. Despite having prior permission and no religious activities, she, along with four doctors, nurses, and children, were detained after extremists accused them of unlawful conversions. A right-wing nationalist group protested outside the police station leading to an FIR under the anti-conversion law against four of them including Sister Shiela.

On 20th August 2023, Santosh, from Maharajganj district of Uttar Pradesh, was hosting a prayer gathering and get together in his house when a group of approximately ten people trespassed his property, physically assaulted him, accusing him of engaging in fraudulent religious conversions.

On 30th July 2022, six Dalit women were arrested in Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh while celebrating the birthday of one of their children. Local extremists witnessed the people praying for the child and reported it as an event of forced conversion.

The kind of misuse that these anti-conversion laws are being put to, is not surprising given how vague the definition of coercion, force, intimidation is.

Like I mentioned earlier, the target is women’s choices, the target is women’s bodies. They do not want to recognize agency for women whether it’s in terms of marriage or falling in love or freedom of choice of religion.

Let us imagine a scene where the anti-conversion laws are declared unconstitutional. Will it change us as a society? That’s the question we have to ask ourselves. Will we then, because the anti-conversion laws have gone, will I allow my daughter to marry a person of her choice? Will I allow an inter-faith marriage? Will I allow communal dining, inter-dining? These are the questions we have to ask ourselves. Because all these social practices that this country is host to, seem to be impervious to the Constitutional values, provisions of the Constitution and of course the statutes that we enact. When we have discussions of why the dowry prohibition act has failed, if Syrian Christians practice dowry, if Muslims practice dowry, if Buddhists practice dowry, then there is something very troubling which we must address. Even if we get rid of anti-conversion laws, unless we ask ourselves the most difficult question, whether we practice constitutional values, we may not find the kind of relief that we might be seeking by declaring these anti-conversion laws to be unconstitutional. That does not mean that we don’t do it.

The anti-conversion laws are a blot on our legal constitutional history. They have to be declared to be unconstitutional by Courts. But that is only a victory that is half won. The real victory will come when we change, we transform ourselves as a society, overcome our innate, inherent prejudices, and emancipate ourselves as true human beings.