Oppressing minorities
An anti-conversion law passed late last year in India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, is being used to prevent interfaith couples from getting married. Media reports suggest right-wing groups are preventing interfaith marriages by claiming it involves "forced conversion." or what they call "love jihad."
"Love jihad" is a term used by these groups to suggest Muslim men seek to deceive Hindu women through marriage and convert them to Islam.
Under the state's anti-conversion law, passed on November 28, interfaith couples must now give two months' notice to a district official before getting married. Under the Special Marriages Act of 1954, which governs interfaith marriages in India, couples must give a notice of 30 days.
The new law has criminal aspects, too, including a jail term of up to 10 years if convicted of using marriage to force a spouse to change his or her faith. Parents, siblings and "any relatives" by marriage and adoption can complain against a conversion. Such marriages can also be nullified.
The burden of proof lies on the persons converting, or those counseling the persons to convert, to prove the conversion isn't forced.
Women's rights advocates are pointing out this amounts to curtailment by the state of the right to choose one's partner.
Under the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), also the ruling party at the federal level, eight of 29 states of India now have anti-conversion laws including these interfaithmarriage clauses. These laws seek to regulate religious conversions through "forcible or fraudulent means," or through "allurement" or "inducement." In practice, they restrain citizens' constitutional right to convert.
A history of religious conversion in India
According to the Indian constitution, citizens have the freedom to "profess, practice and propagate" religion. The word propagate must include the citizen's right to convert.
However, the right to propa- gate and convert has come into contradiction with laws that restrict a citizen from doing so.
Anti-conversion laws have roots in India's colonial history and the deep caste and communal fractures in its society.
As in other parts of the world, the British and other European colonizers were accompanied by cultural missions to "civilize" natives in India.
Proselytizing Christian missionaries have traditionally focused their efforts on better living standards and education among the tribal (indigenous) people of India.
In the 1950s, Indian social reformer Bhim Rao Ambedkar promoted mass conversion to Buddhism as a way for the lower castes, who were considered "untouchable," to escape the Hindu religious order and attain a more dignified life.
Ambedkar was a jurist and chairman of the committee that drafted the Constitution of India. He took up the cause of the "untouchables" within the anti-colonial movement in India, and made a crucial contribution in ensuring freedom of religious conversion was included in the constitution.
The first generation of anti-conversion laws, euphemistically called "Freedom of Religion" Acts, were passed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were enacted in states with higher tribal populations. However, a few princely states in India (those governed by a local ruler or king, unlike other states that were ruled by the British before India's independence) had similar laws in place even before the country became independent in 1947.
These laws were enacted to allay anxiety among the caste Hindus around conversion to Christianity and Islam, and later to stop the lower castes converting to Buddhism, in order to maintain the caste hierarchy.
Recent laws, though, are more forthright in their intent, and include "conversion for marriages." How are the new laws being used?
The new laws have been passed in states where the BJP has strong support. Through these laws, the ruling party's agenda is to mobilize anti-Muslim sentiment in these states.
The case of the latest law in Uttar Pradesh shows the intensification of these tendencies due to upcoming state elections.
As the most populous state, Uttar Pradesh sends the largest contingent of representatives to the Parliament of India.
With the highest concentration of Muslims in the country, the state also had the highest number of Muslim MPs until 2014, when the BJP swept the parliamentary elections by consolidating Hindu voters across caste divides.