Allahabad HC seeks UP reply

PRAYAGRAJ: The Allahabad high court on Friday sought a response from the state government on two petitions that have challenged the constitutional validity of Uttar Pradesh’s controversial ordinance against religious conversions by marriage, coercion or enticement, but declined to put it in abeyance through a stay order.

The ordinance has come to be known as the law on “love jihad”, a term used by some groups to describe a relationship between a Muslim man and a Hindu woman. A bench of chief justices Govind Mathur and Piyush Agrawal issued notices to the government on public interest litigation (PIL) petitions filed by Saurabh Kumar, a lawyer, and one Ajit Prakash Yadav.

The bench, however, refused to stay the operation of the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance, 2020, and fixed the next hearing on January 7.

The petitions have contended that the state has no role to play in the personal choice of individuals in matters of marriage and religion, and that it impinges on the constitutional rights of liberty and privacy of individuals. “The ordinance, which has completely failed to strike a balance between freedoms and mala fide conversions, has been passed and is being implemented in much haste and reckless manner without ensuring that the same does not curb one’s fundamental rights or hamper national integration instead,” added a petition.

The petitions were filed days after a division bench of the high court, in a case of an interfaith marriage, held that the right to live with a person of his/ her choice irrespective of religion was intrinsic to the right to life and personal liberty.

This judgment overturned the earlier rulings by a single judge bench of the high court in that religious conversion just for the sake of marriage was invalid.

The petitions have relied upon the latest division bench judgment to state that UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s reliance on the earlier ruling as justification for the new law was invalid.

According to one of the petitions, chief minister Yogi Adityanath made a statement on October 31 that his government would bring a law against “love jihad” to thwart a conspiracy to convert Hindu women. During his public statement, the chief minister referred to a singlebench judgment of the Allahabad high court in the case of Priyanshi alias Shamreen and another vs the state of UP, in which the court had observed that religious conversion just for the sake of marriage was invalid. The petitioner said that a few days later a division bench of the high court overruled the single-bench verdict, observing that “the right to live with a person of his/her choice, irrespective of religion professed by them, is intrinsic to the right to life and personal liberty”. In the light of the division-bench ruling, the petitioner submitted that the impugned ordinance assumes a contrary position to the ruling of the HC in the Shamreen case.

The petitioner submitted that the provisions of the ordinance give the state policing powers over a citizen’s choice of life partner or religion and thus militated against the fundamental rights to individual autonomy, privacy, human dignity and personal liberty guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution (right to life and personal liberty). Taking exception to this, the plea said the concept of forcing an individual to explain and justify a decision, which is personal to him/her, before an officer of the state is contrary to the Constitution of India, which ensures such rights.