Dr. Sam Paul: Why India’s anti-conversion laws worry democracy

CSI supports Indian church leaders working under discrimination and violence, like Pastor G. (pictured), whose church has been attacked over 10 times. csi

Guest commentary by Dr. Sam Paul Kolakaluri 

As of November 2025, anti-conversion laws (often illogically called “Freedom of Religion” or “prohibition of unlawful conversion” laws) exist in multiple Indian states. Those states are commonly counted at around a dozen — with the most-referenced list including Arunachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh. Several of these laws are near-identical in structure; others have recently tightened restrictions, and more states have begun to actively enforce existing laws.

Different trackers and legal summaries count slightly different totals because some states have older laws, some have passed newer bills, and some amendments or enactments have been challenged in court. A widely cited 2023 survey listed 12 states with such laws (listed above), and in 2024–2025 several states (notably Rajasthan) moved to pass or tighten legislation — bringing intense publicity and enforcement in several jurisdictions. Right now, at least a dozen states have active laws or recently enacted statutes or bills restricting conversions; the exact tally shifts as assemblies legislate and courts rule.

Some key features common to these laws

While exact text differs state by state, the laws share several recurring provisions:

1. Definition of unlawful conversion: Conversion is criminalized, citing that the conversion has taken place by force, fraud, allurement, undue influence, or marriage (many laws list these grounds explicitly).
2. Pre-intimation or approval mechanisms: Some laws require notification to district authorities before a conversion (or before a religious ceremony or an interfaith marriage). Several require the converter/convert to file declarations and permit inquiries. The process is monumental for a common person to complete. This clause is a deliberate step to justify arrests and cause serious legal problems for anyone who wishes to convert and is not able to first complete the difficult process of providing prior notification.
3. Special safeguards for “vulnerable” groups: Penalties are often higher if the person who converts is a woman, minor, member of a Scheduled Caste (SC) or Scheduled Tribe (ST), or otherwise described as “vulnerable.”
4. Criminal penalties and non-bailable offences: Many acts create criminal offenses that are non-bailable and cognizable, enabling arrests without warrant; penalties range from fines to multi-year imprisonment.
5. Provisions around marriage: Several laws treat any marriage that is alleged to be a sham or have the sole object of conversion as an offense and may make such marriages void or voidable.  

These common features make state laws functionally similar even when language differs.

Structural problems and democratic concerns

From a constitutional and human rights standpoint, critics and many legal scholars raise several recurring objections:

1. Curtailed freedom of conscience and religion: The Indian Constitution guarantees the right to freedom of religion and conscience. Laws that draw vague lines around “allurement” or “undue influence” can chill lawful, voluntary conversions and peaceful acceptance of one’s choice of faith. When the state supervises or vets an individual’s change of belief, it intrudes into an intensely personal sphere. This is fully against the spirit of the Indian Constitution that the republic’s founders like Dr. BR Ambedkar envisioned, such that all citizens could believe, practice and propagate a religion of their own choice.
2. Burden on individual choice — especially for women: By treating conversions of women as automatically more suspect and by providing for harsher punishments when the convert is a woman, the laws implicitly question adult women’s capacity to make religious choices. Critics argue this is patronizing and paternalistic and can be used to demean a woman’s capabilities of decision making.
3. Discriminatory impact on SCs/STs and other marginalized groups: While presented as “protective,” the laws often single out SCs/STs as especially vulnerable — and introduce heavier penalties when conversions involve them. That approach can paradoxically deny autonomy of choice to historically marginalised communities and treat their choices as suspect. This reinforces the notion that these so-called vulnerable communities must live without progress or development or transformation. Meanwhile, the government leaders that propagate or design these laws send their family members across the globe for social and economic transformation.
4. Tools for harassment of minorities: Because the offences are criminal and frequently non-bailable, the laws are being used to lodge complaints known as first information reports (FIRs), trigger excessive police action, and intimidate religious minorities and social workers when no coercion occurred. Several human rights observers say the laws are written and enforced in ways that invite arbitrary or motivated complaints. In Uttar Pradesh and in Chhattisgarh states, mobs were accompanied by police to threaten, humiliate, and in some places even beat up peaceful worshippers. Ironically police are giving protection to the violent mobs rather than to those who gather to worship peacefully.
5. Vague or overbroad language: Terms like “allurement,” “inducement,” “undue influence,” or “force” are inherently broad. These terms are being interpreted expansively by police, mobs that want to create havoc among minorities, and enforcement agencies creating legal uncertainty and undue harassment.

Examples of stringent punishments

Punishments vary, but recent high-profile examples illustrate the severity:

• Uttar Pradesh (UP): Penalties include multi-year imprisonment, in some versions up to 10 years or more. Where the alleged victim – the convert – is a woman, a minor, or SC/ST, minimums are higher. Certain offenses are non-bailable.
• Uttarakhand & Haryana: Imprisonment commonly ranges from 1–5 years, with enhanced terms where the converted person is a woman, minor, or SC/ST. Haryana’s 2022 act sets fines running into lakhs – over $1,000 USD – and imprisonment of 1–5 years, with special penalties for concealment of religion in marriage.
• Rajasthan (2025 Act): The recently enacted Rajasthan law, passed by the Assembly in 2025 and reported in October–September coverage, contains some of the strictest penalties seen in state statutes: multi-year minimum sentences, heavy minimum fines (lakhs of rupees, equivalent to thousands of U.S. dollars), non-bailable offenses, and possible imprisonment for 25 years, or even life imprisonment for repeat or mass conversion offenses in the harshest formulations. Most media coverage rightly called it among the strictest. I would say it’s simply bizarre.

These concrete penalties make clear why legal scholars and civil liberties groups worry about misuse and overreach. The critics warn the very introduction of these laws is to be understood as the game plan of some religious extremist groups to hold women, SC/STs, and vulnerable groups subjugated in their place and ensure that they should not progress towards transformation in their lives.

Recent developments in the Supreme Court of India

The Supreme Court of India has recently taken an active role in petitions challenging state anti-conversion laws and in the judicial oversight of prosecutions under those laws:

The Court has flagged concerns about some provisions of state conversion statutes and has asked multiple states to file counter-affidavits in petitions challenging the legislation — signaling that constitutional questions will be examined closely.

The Supreme Court has also quashed several FIRs lodged under the Uttar Pradesh conversion law, observing that criminal law must not be used to harass innocent citizens and directing careful judicial scrutiny of prosecutions. These orders affirm my submission earlier that these laws have been misused by police and law enforcement authorities: simply filing FIRs under conversion laws threatens minorities and the vulnerable.  Hence the Court has listed broader challenges to anti-conversion laws for hearing; petitioners and states are being called upon to place full records before the Court.

Constitutional and ethical conclusions

The Indian Constitution is founded on secularism and the guarantee of freedom of conscience. The foundation of a democracy is the freedom to choose.  India, the world’s largest democracy, puts effort, heavy publicity, and expense into getting every Indian citizen after the age of 18 to use his or her vote to select a leader.  When such grand activities are the norm of Indian democracy, then demeaning women and certain vulnerable communities as incapable of deciding their faith, or labeling them as not capable of making their own choices about what to believe, is anti-democratic.

While the state has many laws on cheating others, illegal activities, and so on, criminalizing this sacred act of choosing one’s faith in the modern cluster of anti-conversion laws is a matter of concern. It is often ambiguous in language, penal in character, and focused on policing voluntary acts by adults, particularly women and marginalized communities — raising serious constitutional and democratic concerns. In practice these laws have often become instruments for opinionated harassment of religious minorities and for curtailing personal liberty under the guise of protection.

For those reasons, many legal scholars, rights groups, and — increasingly — the Supreme Court’s interventions suggest these laws need re-examination, and in many views, repeal or major re-drafting so they do not violate the spirit of religious freedom guaranteed by the Constitution.

The Rt. Rev. Dr. Sam Paul Kolakaluri is the Founder President of the National Christian Council in India.