(UCA News) — Good Friday is, at its core, a story about state power deciding it has the right to supervise faith.

A Roman governor, satisfied that a man’s beliefs posed a threat to public order, acted without waiting for harm to occur. He did not need a victim. He needed suspicion, a procedural framework, and officials willing to use it.

That story is 2,000 years old. Some version of it, it turns out, is still being written.

Within the same week this March, two BJP-governed Indian states passed laws that together reveal something more than coincidence.

Maharashtra’s Dharma Swatantrya Adhiniyam (Freedom of Religion Act) cleared both houses on March 16. Chhattisgarh’s Freedom of Religion Bill followed three days later. Both claim the same modest, defensible goal: stopping forced or fraudulent religious conversion.

Nobody seriously disputes that goal. What deserves scrutiny is the machinery built in its name.

Maharashtra’s most striking innovation is what lawyers call suo motu cognisance. A police officer who is merely “satisfied” that a conversion is taking place or is about to take place can investigate, summon, and act — no complaint required, no victim necessary, no relative filing a grievance.

Add to this the mandatory 60-day prior notice that anyone intending to convert must submit to the district magistrate, during which objections can be filed, and enquiries quietly initiated, and the picture becomes complete. Your intention to change your faith is the state’s business before it is even yours.

Chhattisgarh arrives at the same destination by a different road. It replaces a 1968 law with penalties so steep they strain comprehension: up to twenty years in prison for converting a minor, a woman, or someone from a Scheduled Caste or Tribe; life imprisonment for what it defines as “mass conversion” — which, remarkably, means two or more people.

Anyone intending to convert must file a declaration with the district magistrate. That declaration is then displayed publicly, at the magistrate’s office and in local panchayats, open for 60 days while objections accumulate. Religious functionaries must give prior notice.

Mass conversions must be posted on the government’s official website. And in a detail that reveals exactly whose conscience these laws are designed to protect, reconversion to one’s “ancestral religion” — what is popularly called “ghar wapsi” — is explicitly excluded from the definition of conversion altogether. One direction of faith is monitored. The other is quietly waved through.

This is not an isolated legislative instinct. Uttar Pradesh enacted similar legislation in 2021, and the results were instructive. Over 835 cases had been filed by mid-2024. The Allahabad High Court, reviewing them in 2025, found many were essentially templated complaints — identical language, identical structure, deployed repeatedly against people whose only visible offence was belonging to a minority community or marrying across religious lines.

Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh do not merely add to that record. They refine it, hardening a template now circulating across India with quiet, methodical efficiency.

The pattern deserves to be named precisely. Maharashtra lowers the investigative trigger — suspicion replaces complaint. Chhattisgarh stretches the definition of coercion itself, expanding “allurement” and “undue influence” to cover jobs, education, medical assistance, marriage, and even the threat of social boycott.

Put the two together, and what emerges is a system where the threshold for state involvement keeps falling while the consequences of being caught in that machinery keep rising. One law broadens suspicion. The other operationalizes it.

Civil society in both states recognized this quickly. In Maharashtra, over thirty organizations and Christian communities rallied in Mumbai on March 11 — days before the bill even passed — not to oppose anti-coercion laws in principle, but to demand that the text be debated openly before handing magistrates and police officers permanent oversight of every citizen’s religious life.

In Chhattisgarh, thousands marched through Raipur on March 22, calling the new law a black law. Congress members of the legislative assembly boycotted the session and demanded a select committee review. The protest in both places was modest and entirely constitutional: debate this in public before it becomes permanent.

That debate is now partly heading to court. The National Council of Churches has already filed a public interest litigation challenging anti-conversion laws across 12 states, and in February a bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant referred the matter to a three-judge bench, issuing notices to the federal government and the states.

Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh will likely become the thirteenth and fourteenth exhibits in that case. The Supreme Court has so far upheld the core principle — that states can regulate forced conversion — while signaling discomfort about overreach. What it has never squarely confronted is whether a prior-notice requirement, combined with public display of intent and suo motu police powers, constitutes regulation or something closer to surveillance.

These laws could still be salvaged, but only if certain lines hold. A police officer acting on suspicion alone should need a magistrate’s approval within 48 hours — not as paperwork, but as a genuine check on the temptation to harass.

The definitions of allurement and coercion need to be drawn tightly enough that a pastor offering medical help, a woman choosing her husband, or a student persuaded by a friend’s faith does not find herself caught in a criminal net designed for actual predators.

The ghar wapsi exemption, which quietly tells you that the law was never really about protecting everyone equally, should go entirely. And every inquiry, every notice, every summons issued under these laws should be recorded, time-stamped, and automatically placed before a judge — not because officials cannot be trusted, but because history has repeatedly shown what happens when they do not have to be.

Without those guardrails, what these laws protect is not freedom from coercion. It is the state’s freedom to decide — in advance, in public, and with a police officer’s signature – whether your change of faith is permissible. Looking at Good Friday, of all days, it is worth pausing to remember where that logic has led before.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.

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