Current Volume 9
Regulating Religious Conversion in India: A Constitutional Critique of State Anti-Conversion Laws
Abstract
Religious conversion in India is a constitutional question located at the intersection of freedom of conscience, public order, privacy, family autonomy and criminal process. State anti-conversion statutes are generally defended as measures against force, fraud and exploitation; yet the latest generation of laws has moved beyond the narrow prevention of coercion and entered the domain of prior permission, police inquiry, marriage scrutiny, reverse burden and public disclosure. This paper argues that the older public-order foundation of anti-conversion law, affirmed in Rev. Stainislaus, cannot mechanically validate every modern statutory design. After Puttaswamy and Shafin Jahan, statutes that expose an adult’s change of faith to public notice, family objections and criminal suspicion must satisfy a stricter constitutional inquiry. The paper comparatively examines the laws of Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Haryana and Rajasthan, incorporates recent judicial developments up to 2026, and proposes an autonomy-sensitive coercion test for harmonising protection against exploitation with the constitutional promise of conscience.
Keywords
Religious Conversion, Article 25, Anti-Conversion Laws, Freedom of Conscience, Privacy, Inter-Faith Marriage, Unlawful Conversion, Public Order, Reverse Burden, India.
Citations
IRE Journals:
Shivesh Raghuvanshi "Regulating Religious Conversion in India: A Constitutional Critique of State Anti-Conversion Laws" Iconic Research And Engineering Journals Volume 9 Issue 11 2026 Page 4125-4136
IEEE:
Shivesh Raghuvanshi
"Regulating Religious Conversion in India: A Constitutional Critique of State Anti-Conversion Laws" Iconic Research And Engineering Journals, 9(11)
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