Anti-Conversion Laws
https://www.epw.in/engage/article/anti-conversion-laws
the conversion debate is the denial of reservation by those members of the Scheduled Castes converting to other religions. By insisting that Scheduled Castes exist only among the specified religious groups, the acts, in fact, have implicated the judicial and administrative apparatuses in a process that turns religion into a tool of manipulation.
the question of the dalit conversion is tied up with the question of decolonisation in the subcontinent. The problem with this kind of internal colonialism is that the colonised cannot escape in a physical sense. They have no independent territory of their own: they cannot emigrate, and they cannot send the colonisers home. What is more, they cannot easily lay claim to an independent history and culture: indeed they gain their identity at least in part by their incorporation into the dominant culture or society: ‘African-Americans’, “the Muslims of India”, “untouchable” Hindus.
Rather than struggle to maintain the old status quo, a constructive approach would be responsive politics and economic equity, religious reform and cultural renewal. Protection against proselytisation is today rightly seen as a response to a community’s right to its own religious tradition, much in the same way as the right to its own language and culture. Yet if their concern is only over religious conversions and not the wretched situation of their people, can opposition to their conversion be justified on religious grounds? What kind of religious community would be indifferent to the misery of its oppressed members and yet be opposed to them wanting to leave it? What is being affirmed and what negated here?