Series: The Conversion Laws — Three Essays Part I · The Law Part II · The Lineage Part III · The Memory
Part II of III · History & Politics
- S. Vikram, Political Commentator
The Chhattisgarh bill did not spring from a BJP election manifesto. Its roots go back to 1967, to a Congress government in Orissa, and to a Supreme Court judgment delivered under Emergency rule. What changed is not the impulse but the intensity — and the three social tensions it has always been designed to manage.
It is tempting, and not entirely wrong, to read the Chhattisgarh Freedom of Religion Bill as a product of Hindutva electoral politics — one item in a long list of culture-war legislation from BJP-ruled states. The temptation should be resisted, not because it is false, but because it is incomplete. The legal architecture that the 2026 bill extends and intensifies was not built by the BJP. It was built, brick by quiet brick, across more than five decades and across party lines. To understand what the 2026 bill is actually doing, one must trace where it came from.
The True Origin: 1967, Orissa, Swatantra Party
The first post-independence anti-conversion law in India was the Orissa Freedom of Religion Act, 1967, passed under the Swatantra Party government of Chief Minister Rajendra Narayan Singh Deo. The Swatantra Party was a right-leaning, anti-Congress formation — but it was not Jana Sangh, and it was not the BJP’s predecessor in any direct organisational sense. The impulse behind the law was real anxiety about missionary activity in Orissa’s tribal belt, not a nationally coordinated Hindutva project.
The Madhya Pradesh version followed in 1968 — under a Congress government. The Madhya Pradesh Dharma Swatantraya Adhiniyam used nearly identical language: prohibiting conversions by force, allurement, or fraudulent means, with post-conversion reporting requirements and penalties that seem almost quaint by today’s standards. Maximum imprisonment was one year. Fines were measured in hundreds of rupees.
Both laws defined “conversion” in their definitional sections with a simplicity that bordered on tautology: renouncing one religion and adopting another. Neither provided a precise evidentiary test for what constituted conversion. Neither created an official register of religion. Both relied, in enforcement, almost entirely on third-party complaints.
- 1967 Orissa Freedom of Religion Act — the first post-independence anti-conversion statute. Swatantra Party government. Maximum penalty: 1 year / ₹5,000. Not BJP or Jana Sangh. Often misattributed.
- 1968 Madhya Pradesh Dharma Swatantraya Adhiniyam — passed under a Congress government. Near-identical language. Post-conversion intimation to District Magistrate required. Inherited by Chhattisgarh after state’s bifurcation from MP in 2000.
- 1977 Rev. Stanislaus vs. State of Madhya Pradesh — Supreme Court upholds both laws. Delivered January 17, 1977, under Indira Gandhi’s Congress government. CJI A.N. Ray leads five-judge bench. The Janata Party (which included old Jana Sangh) came to power only after March 1977 elections. The judgment predates it.
- 1990s–2014 Gradual spread of similar laws to other states. Enforcement remains light. No prior-permission requirement anywhere. Conviction rates extremely low.
- 2019–2026 Qualitative escalation. UP (2021), MP (2021 revision), Gujarat, Karnataka, and now Chhattisgarh (2026) introduce prior permission, marriage clauses, non-bailable offences, and penalties reaching life imprisonment. This wave is BJP-driven and represents a fundamental shift — not just tightening but transformation.
The Stanislaus Judgment: Foundational and Finite
The 1977 Supreme Court ruling in Rev. Stanislaus vs. State of Madhya Pradesh remains the legal bedrock on which every subsequent anti-conversion law rests. A Catholic priest challenged the MP Act’s validity, arguing that the right to “propagate” religion under Article 25(1) of the Constitution includes the right to convert others. The Orissa High Court had agreed with this reasoning and struck down the Orissa Act. The Madhya Pradesh High Court had disagreed and upheld the MP Act. The Supreme Court was asked to resolve the conflict.
Chief Justice A.N. Ray, writing for the five-judge Constitution Bench, upheld both Acts. The right to propagate, the Court held, means the right to transmit or spread one’s religion through exposition of its tenets — not the right to override another person’s conscience by converting them. Forced or induced conversion itself violates the freedom of conscience of the person being converted, which Article 25 also protects. State legislatures, the Court added, have competence to legislate on such matters under Entry 1 of List II — public order — since forcible conversions can trigger communal tension and breach of peace.
“What the Article grants is not the right to convert another person to one’s own religion, but to transmit or spread one’s religion by an exposition of its tenets.”
Chief Justice A.N. Ray · Rev. Stanislaus vs. State of M.P., January 17, 1977
The judgment is foundational — it has been cited in every challenge to anti-conversion laws since. But it is also finite. It upheld mild post-facto reporting requirements and light penalties for an era when enforcement was minimal and the state’s role was passive. It did not address prior-permission regimes. It did not assess penalties measured in decades. It did not grapple with a system where conversion is declared criminal before it occurs, subject to public objection and bureaucratic gatekeeping. As the 2026 bill and its counterparts in UP and MP move through inevitable Supreme Court challenge, petitioners will argue — not unreasonably — that Stanislaus validated a very different kind of law than the one now on the books.
What the Law Was Always About
The legal lineage matters. But so does the social reality underneath it. Anti-conversion laws have never been only about preventing fraud or coercion. They have been instruments for managing three distinct social tensions — each real, each producing genuine political pressure, and each poorly served by the pretence that the law is simply about protecting vulnerable people from predatory missionaries.
Tension I
The Tribal Cosmological Rupture
Many central Indian tribal communities — and Chhattisgarh is one of the most densely tribal states in the country — operate within worldviews where the self is not extractable from its web of relations: ancestors, land, deity, community. An individual conversion creates a structural rupture that no bureaucratic process can resolve. The convert neither fully belongs to the old collective nor can be cleanly excluded from it without tearing the social fabric. The 1967 Orissa law arose precisely in this context — genuine community anxiety about missionary-driven individual conversions in tribal belts, not manufactured outrage. The law attempts to force this cosmological anomaly into an administrative box. It cannot resolve the discomfort. It can only criminalise the act that causes it.
Tension II
The Dalit Reservation Rivalry
Under the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950, SC status requires professing Hinduism, Sikhism, or Buddhism. Genuine conversion to Christianity or Islam legally ends SC eligibility. Enforcement is complaint-driven and uneven; many continue using old certificates until challenged. Recent court orders in UP, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh have called this “fraud on the Constitution.” The rivalry operates within the Dalit cohort: church-run schools, foreign-funded networks, and international advocacy are sometimes perceived as giving Christian converts advantages while they retain quota access. Whether this perception is accurate in aggregate is disputed. That it generates real political pressure is not. Anti-conversion laws serve a dual function here: deterring conversion at the outset, and providing a legal handle for subsequent caste certificate challenges.
Tension III
Marriage, Patriarchy, and the Reproductive Frontier
This is the sharpest and most constitutionally vulnerable tension — and it is the one the marriage clause in the 2026 bill is designed to address. Caste, as B.R. Ambedkar argued in Annihilation of Caste, is fundamentally a system of endogamy enforced through the sexual policing of women. Caste purity is reproduced through the womb: children inherit the father’s lineage, caste status, and religious eligibility. When a woman converts to Christianity or Islam and marries within that faith, two simultaneous threats materialise. The patriarchal order loses exclusive claim over her reproductive capacity. The caste boundary is breached — endogamy fails. This double threat explains why “love jihad” legislation has accompanied anti-conversion laws since 2019, and why the marriage clause is the provision most fiercely defended by governments and most fiercely challenged in courts. The woman’s conscience — her autonomous choice of partner and faith — is precisely what the law renders administratively suspect. The state, by demanding prior notice and public scrutiny before any conversion linked to marriage, becomes the enforcer of what the joint family and caste panchayat once policed directly.
What Changed — and What Didn’t
The three tensions above have existed since at least the 1960s. They produced the 1967 and 1968 laws. They produced the Stanislaus judgment. They have been politically available to parties across the spectrum. What is genuinely new in the post-2019 wave — and what makes the 2026 Chhattisgarh bill constitutionally different, not merely harsher — is the shift from reactive to proactive enforcement.
The 1968 law said: if you convert someone through improper means, report it afterward, and if you fail to report it, that too is an offence. The state was passive. It waited to be told. The 2026 bill says: before you convert, come to the state, declare your intention, post it publicly, wait for objections, receive approval, and only then proceed. The state is now the gatekeeper. The prior-permission requirement is not a procedural refinement of the 1968 logic. It is a structural inversion of it.
This distinction will matter enormously when the Supreme Court considers the consolidated petitions from the National Council of Churches and other bodies that are currently pending. The Court upheld the 1968-style law. It has not yet ruled on whether a prior-permission regime — one that treats spiritual change as a privilege requiring bureaucratic clearance rather than a right requiring only the absence of fraud — is constitutionally sustainable.
The answer to that question depends partly on law. It depends more on how deeply the Court is willing to look at what these laws are actually doing, and what memories they are actually serving. That is the subject of the third and final part of this series.
Next in the series
Part III — The Memory That Wrote the Law:
Buddhism, Brahminism, and the Fear of Exit
→
← Part I: The Law That Tries to Police the Soul
Legal and historical references: Orissa Freedom of Religion Act, 1967 · Madhya Pradesh Dharma Swatantraya Adhiniyam, 1968 · Rev. Stanislaus vs. State of Madhya Pradesh, (1977) 1 SCC 677 · Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950 · B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936) · Shafin Jahan vs. Asokan K.M., (2018) 16 SCC 368
This is the second of three essays. Part I examined the 2026 bill’s provisions and the philosophical impossibility at its heart. Part III examines the civilisational memory that produced it.
