Debate on right to religion

(MainsGS2:Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation.)

Context:

• The Supreme Court recently said that religious conversions by means of force, allurement or fraud may “ultimately affect the security of the nation and freedom of religion and conscience of citizens” and asked the Centre to clarify what it was doing to curb such conversions.

Freedom of Religion:

• Article 25(1) of the Constitution says “all persons” are equally entitled to the freedom of conscience and the right to profess, practise and propagate religion freely.
• The debate on religious freedom goes back to the Constituent Assembly when the framers of our constitution debated the inclusion of the “right to propagate” as a fundamental right. 
• Some members wanted to replace the word “propagate” with “practise privately”, fearing that the right would create room for forceful conversions.
• Lokanath Misra, a member from Odisha, cautioned the Assembly that “the cry of religion is a dangerous cry” as he said “It denominates, it divides, and encamps people to warring ways.” 
• Pandit Lakshmi Kanta Maitra disagreed, saying that “propagation does not necessarily mean seeking converts by force of arms”. 
• He argued the fundamental right to propagate would probably work to remove the “misconceptions” in the minds of the people about other co-existing religions in this land of different faiths.

Judicial interpretation:

• The right to propagate was ultimately kept in the Constitution but States and civil society have knocked on the doors of the judiciary time and again to interpret this freedom. 
• The Supreme Court verdict in Rev. Stainislaus vs. State of Madhya Pradesh in the 1960s is frequently cited in matters involving religious freedom. 
• Then Chief Justice of India A.N. Ray, heading a five-judge Bench,dissected Article 25 to hold that “the Article does not grant the right to convert other persons to one’s own religion but to transmit or spread one’s religion by an exposition of its tenets.”
• Court interpreted that “What is freedom for one is freedom for the other in equal measure and there can, therefore, be no such thing as a fundamental right to convert any person to one’s own religion,”. 

Acts of states:

• Before independence, princely States had Acts such as the Raigarh State Conversion Act of 1936, the Patna Freedom of Religion Act of 1942, the Sarguja State Apostasy Act of 1945 and the Udaipur State Anti-Conversion Act of 1946, mainly against conversion to Christianity.
• In post-independence India, Odisha became the first State to enact a law restricting religious conversions, which later became a model framework for other States. 
• Odisha’s 1967 Act provides that no person shall directly or indirectly convertany person from one religious faith to another by force, inducement or any fraudulent means.
• Now more than ten Indian States have enacted laws prohibiting certain means of religious conversions.

Centre’s stand:

• In an affidavit filed in the Supreme Court last month, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs said that the right to religion did not include the right to convert other people to a particular religion, especially through fraud, deception, coercion, allurement and other means. 
• The MHA reiterated the interpretation of Article 25 given by the Supreme Court in the Stainislaus judgement of 1977. “Fraudulent or induced conversion impinged upon the right to freedom of conscience of an individual apart from hampering public order and, therefore, the state is well within its power to regulate/restrict it.
• It has, however, not clarified if it will come up with a special law on religious conversions, as sought in the petition. 

Conclusion:

• The MHA said the word ‘propagate’ in Article 25 (right to freedom of religion) does not include the right to convert. It is rather in the nature of a positive right to spread one’s religion by exposition of its tenets.