Modi Government’s Stand on ‘Right to Convert’ Is an Attack on the Freedom of Conscience https://thewire.in/government/modi-governments-stand-on-right-to-convert-is-an-attack-on-the-freedom-of-conscience The Narendra Modi government has submitted a formal affidavit declaring that the “right to freedom of religion does not include a fundamental right to convert other people to a particular religion”.
The government has said this even though it quotes Article 25 of the Indian constitution which guarantees all persons in India (and not just citizens) freedom of conscience and the right to free profession, practice and propagation of religion. The crucial argument made by the government is that the Supreme Court has, in its Stanislaus judgment of 1977, already declared that the right to ‘propagate religion’ under Article 25 does not include the right to convert but rather “is in the nature of the positive right to spread once [sic] religion by exposition of its tenets”...
Justice Deepak Gupta’s landmark 2011 judgment (when he was a judge of the Himachal high court) striking down similarly worded sections of a state law on the grounds of freedom of conscience: “A person not only has a right of conscience, the right of belief, the right to change his belief, but also has the right to keep his beliefs secret. No doubt, the right to privacy is, like any other right, subject to public order, morality and the larger interest of the State… However, this does not mean that the majority interest is the larger public interest. Larger public interest would mean the integrity, unity and sovereignty of the country, the maintenance of public law and order. Merely because the majority view is different does not mean that the minority view must be silenced…
Earlier laws seeking to regulate religious conversion, such as the 1968 Madhya Pradesh’s Dharma Swatanrya Adhiniyam, had the fig leaf of making it mandatory for the person performing the act of conversion to inform the government in advance. But the new crop of laws in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh go one step further and require the person converting to essentially secure government approval first.