the role of a doorman to regulate the laws determining
conversion. This role attains manifestation in the anti
conversion legislations existent in various states in
India. The state laws restricting conversions became
the subject of major Supreme Court decision in
Stanislaus case. This case focused primarily on Article
25 of the Constitution of India which states that
subject to public order, morality and health, and to the
other fundamental rights guaranteed in the
Constitution, all persons are equally entitled to
“freedom of conscience and the right to freely profess
practise and propagate religion.” The right to
propagate one's religion means the right to
communicate the person's beliefs to another person or
to expose the tenets of that faith, but would not include
the right to convert another person to the former's
faith, because the latter is equally entitled to freedom
of conscience. Resultantly, Article 25(1) of the
Constitution does not insure the right to convert rather
guarantees only the right to freely propagate, profess
and practice one’s own religion. Forcible conversion
which is likely to give rise to an apprehension of breech
of public order and which is reprehensible to the
conscience of the community is not permissible under
this Article.
The anti conversion laws in India restricts religious
conversions via “force” and “allurement”, in particular.
Enforcement of such legislation necessitates evaluating
a convert’s state of mind by examining their motives
and will to convert or in assessing whether the
conversion was legitimate or the converts were “lured”.
This assessment made by the courts or government in
recent times is stemmed on two assumptions: one, the
conversion in groups may not have freely chosen
conversion and two that certain groups are
particularly vulnerable to being lured into changing
their religion. These assumptions have become the
foundation to source out the social fabric notions that
considers women and lower caste as inherently
primitive and amenable to allurement.
The state laws prohibit conversion through force,
allurement and fraud. However, there strives ambiguity
in the language of the statutes which makes it difficult
to analyse the convert’s motives and define the
boundaries of allurement, fraud and force.
Unfortunately, none of the words have been clearly
defined in the legislations. For example, there have been
instances documented in government reports where
people have converted due to medical, financial and
material benefit all of which stem from the spirituality
of faith. In other instances, people have reconverted to
their original religion if they did not receive from the
divine what they had initially prayed for. For Instance:
‘Family of Kala Marandi remained Christian for 3
years. Her husband was suffering from some incurable
disease. He got cured when he became Christian but
later died in an accident. Kala Marandi then again
became a Hindu in 1998’. The problem has further
become man