As of August 2024, four years after Uttar Pradesh enacted its anti-conversion law, 1,682 people have been arrested and 835 criminal cases filed under the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Act, 2021. The number of convictions? Fewer than a dozen. Since then, nine other states have followed suit, including Uttarakhand and Rajasthan, where disproportionately severe amendments prescribe prison terms of up to life.

But India’s uneasy relationship with religious conversion runs deeper. The Constitution guarantees every Indian the right to “freely profess, practise and propagate” religion, yet the State often struggles to distinguish persuasion from coercion. In Stanislaus v. State of MP (1977), the Supreme Court ruled that “propagating” does not include “proselytising”. This narrow reading — although later viewed as a departure from the spirit of Article 25 — nevertheless gave legal cover to the first generation of so-called “Freedom of Religion” laws that claimed to protect choice but often ended up policing it.

Today’s laws go much further. They criminalise conversion through vague terms like force, allurement, or undue influence and reverse........

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