Religious conversions, in their truest essence, represent an act of devotion and conscience. It is a dialogue between the self and the divine, a process that transcends social boundaries and political categorization. However, in contemporary India, this spiritual choice has been transformed into a space of legal anxiety. Anti-conversion bills across multiple states like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Uttarakhand, and Rajasthan reveal deep contradictions in their constitutional and legal structure and in philosophical and moral logic.
These laws, presented as safeguards of “religious freedom”,are, in reality, ways of control that undermine the very agency they claim to protect.
I hasten to censure critics–those who reject what I, as a revert to Islam, have to say about “religious freedom” have gone through extremes in their condemnation and stigmatization of conversions. In this essay, I reflect on the intellectual, psychological, theological, and academic loopholes of India’s anti-conversion laws as an attempt to show how such legislation fails not only at the level of jurisprudence but also at the level of human spirit.
Misunderstanding the Nature of Faith
Faith by its very nature can’t be legislated. It isn’t born out of persuasion or power but conviction. For me, faith was a calling; it was not an adoption of a new creed but a return to the primordial truth, what the Holy Quran refers to as fitrah, the inclination towards the oneness of God–Tawheed. Anti-conversion laws rest on the flawed assumption that belief can be induced through material or emotional “allurements”. In doing so, they ignore the deeply spiritual dimension of religious transformation and turn a very sacred act into a matter of public interrogation. This is spiritual absurdity: the state demands proof for sincerity when sincerity itself is an unseen reality known only to God. Thus, the loophole of these laws is their spiritual illiteracy and their failure to understand that belief cannot be verified through documentation. Spiritual freedom, once made conditional upon bureaucratic approval, that too, in the name of “religious freedom”, ceases to be free at all.
Criminalising Inquiry and Reason
The Anti-conversion Law operates on the “assumption” that converts are passive recipients of manipulation rather than active seekers of truth. As someone who has spent years exploring religion and philosophy, I find this both insulting and dangerous. This undermines human intellect and the very faculty that both religion and philosophy place at the center of moral agency.
In Islamic theology, aql (reason) is considered a divine gift, through which humans are expected to discern truth from falsehood. The Indian constitution, too, assumes the rational capacity of the individual as a foundation of citizenship. Yet, anti-conversion laws condescend to citizens, especially women and marginalized groups, suggesting they lack the intellectual autonomy to make spiritual choices without external influence.
By equating faith with brainwashing, these laws criminalize curiosity and contemplation. They delegitimize the act of questioning, reflecting, and choosing, reducing religion to a static inheritance rather than a living, evolving conviction. In academic terms, this is an aggressive denial of epistemic freedom–the right to construct and arrive at knowledge independently.
Humiliation and the Policing of Conscience
Conversion is not merely an intellectual act; it is an emotional reorientation, an intimate reconciliation between the heart and the mind. The requirement that one must submit declarations in advance, undergo public hearings, and await state validation converts a deeply private journey into a spectacle of humiliation. It subjects converts to ridicule, surveillance, and stigma within their social environment. The laws not only deter conversion but also emotionally discipline individuals into silence.
This emotional policing extends to love and relationships. The innovation of the so-called “love jihad” within the anti-conversion discourse ensures that interfaith unions are viewed with suspicion, and women who choose Muslim partners are cast as victims of deceit.
The emotional loophole therefore lies in the failure to recognize faith and love as voluntary human experiences, not crimes requiring state certification.
Trauma, Surveillance and Identity Fragmentation
As someone who is both a psychologist with a master’s degree in clinical psychology and a revert to Islam who has personally navigated this journey, I can vouch for the profound psychological impact of such laws on converts/reverts. Legally mandated scrutiny creates a condition of chronic vigilance. Converts live under constant fear of being monitored or accused, producing what trauma theorists describe as hypervigilance–a heightened state of anxiety resulting from anticipated persecution. This legal surveillance induces a form of identity trauma. When an individual’s faith becomes grounds of interrogation, it breaks the very sense of belonging both to the community of origin and to the one embraced. The law validates social hostility, transforming prejudice into institutionalized suspicion.
Moreover, the demand to “prove” sincerity causes moral injury. For converts, this repeated invalidation impacts psychological stability, leading to internal conflict between personal faith and social survival.
Who Owns Belief? The State or the Soul
Theologically, the anti-conversion laws commit a profound transgression: they position the state as the final judge of belief. By demanding official approval for conversion, they assume the right to evaluate spiritual sincerity that must be directed to God alone, a role reserved, in all major faiths, to the divine alone.
In Islam, the relationship between God and the individual is direct and sacred. No human authority can certify or nullify one’s intention to believe. Similarly, in Hindu philosophy the pursuit of truth (satya) and liberation (moksha) are personal journeys of the soul. When the state arrogates this right, it symbolically replaces divine sovereignty with bureaucratic sovereignty.
It must be noted that this is not merely a political error, it’s a theological distortion. The laws effectively institutionalize disbelief by demanding external proof of what is, by definition, an internal conviction meant to bring internal solitude.
A claim without foundation
From an academic and policy standpoint, anti-conversion laws rest on a data vacuum. There is little to no empirical evidence of widespread “forced conversions” in India. State records, court proceedings, and independent investigations have repeatedly shown that most conversions are voluntary and self-initiated. Yet, the language of these laws invokes large-scale threats without substantiating them. Terms such as “allurement”, “inducement,” and “mass conversion” remain legally undefined, leaving vast room for arbitrary interpretation. Such conceptual vagueness violates the most basic principles of legal certainty, rendering the law constitutionally suspect.
In addition, the laws fail the test of proportionality–punishments including imprisonment and fines bear no rational relation to alleged harm. From an academic perspective, this is a policy built on myth rather than data , and emotion rather than evidence.
Morality bows to Majority
Sociologically, anti-conversion laws do not protect a religion; they protect hierarchy. They function as instruments of majoritarian morality, reinforcing the notion that certain faiths are inherently “Indian” while others are foreign intrusions. The narrative of ghar wapsi exposes this duplicity. When a person returns to Hinduism, the act is celebrated as a homecoming; when one embraces Islam or Christianity, it suddenly becomes national betrayal. Several pieces of legislation explicitly exempt ghar wapsi from procedural requirements, institutionalizing religious asymmetry.
Such selective legitimacy violates the secular principles of state neutrality. More importantly, it fractures India’s plural social fabric, instilling suspicion between communities and reducing personal faith to a matter of political loyalty.
Violations of Fundamental Rights
At the constitutional level, these laws violate Articles 14, 19, 21, and 25 of the Indian Constitution. They invert the presumption of innocence by requiring the convert to prove the absence of coercion. They infringe upon the right to privacy, autonomy, and dignity, all integral components of Article 21. Moreover, they contradict Article 25, which guarantees the right to profess, practise, and propagate religion. The procedural hurdles imposed effectively nullify this freedom. They also breach Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which explicitly recognizes the right to change one’s religion.
Constitutionally, therefore, anti-conversion laws are self-contradictory in nature; they claim to preserve the freedom of religion while criminalizing the very exercise of it.
The Ideological State and the Machinery of Control
Anti-conversion laws in India cannot be understood without the ideological apparatus that sustains them. Their emergence and enforcement reflect the consolidation of a political project of majoritarian nationalism, a vision of India where religious identity is tied to cultural loyalty and dissenting faiths are perceived as threats to national cohesion. Under the ruling political establishment, the line between religion and governance has increasingly blurred. Organizations inspired by the Hindutva worldview have not only shaped public discourse but have also actively pressured legislative and judicial mechanisms to align with their ideological goals. The result is a systematic attempt to redefine Indian citizenship through the prism of religious conformity.
Right-wing groups like Bajrang Dal and RSS operate under the guise of “cultural protection” or “religious harmony” and often serve as the informal enforcers of these laws. Their street-level vigilantism through raids, intimidation, and moral policing, functions as a parallel justice system. Anti-conversion laws thus become the legal facade of a deeper social engineering project, where coercion is exercised through courtrooms. The result is not protection of faith but monopolization of belief, where spiritual autonomy is sacrificed at the altar of ideological conformity.
Moral Apathy and the Death of Conscience
Finally, at the moral level, these laws represent a failure of imagination, a refusal to recognize the human being as a moral being capable of transcendence. To punish individuals for believing differently is to deny the very essence of what it means to be human: the freedom to seek, to err, to change, and to grow. It replaces moral responsibility with fear , faith with compliance and conscience with conformity.
In existential terms, such laws produce a spiritual contradiction: they force individuals to choose between honesty and safety. To live truthfully becomes to live dangerously.
Faith, Freedom and the Courage to Believe
As an Indian revert to Islam, I see anti-conversion laws as not only legal failures but also psychological and existential violations. For someone who has walked the path of faith in an atmosphere thick with doubt, I have learned the deepest wound these laws inflict is not on the body, but on the soul. They seek to occupy the conscience itself. Yet, faith in its essence defies containment. It cannot be recorded, regulated or restrained by state decrees. It’s practised in solitude. Every convert’s journey, mine included, testifies to this endurance: once the heart awakens to truth, it ceases to fear the mechanisms designed to suppress it.
In the end, these laws do not legislate religion; they legislate fear. But fear falters before conviction. Faith born in conviction, regardless of the hurdles, learns to keep walking even when the world demands it kneel.
