Religious Freedom and Mass Conversion in India

Religious Freedom

and Mass Conversion

in India

PENNSYLVANIA STUDIES IN HUMAN RIGHTS

Bert B. Lockwood, Series Editor

A complete list of books in the series

is available from the publisher.

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

AND MASS CONVERSION

IN INDIA

Laura Dudley Jenkins

Copyright © 2019 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

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University of Pennsylvania Press

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A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-8122-5092-3

CONTENTS

Introduction. Religious Freedom and the Right to Convert

PART I. MOBILITY

Chapter 1. Mass Movement Christians: Religious and Social Mobility

Chapter 2. Ambedkarite Buddhists: Religious and Political Mobility

Chapter 3. Mizo Jews: Religious and Spatial Mobility

PART II. IMMOBILITY

Chapter 4. Prosecution: Anticonversion Legislation

Chapter 5. Prevention: Losing Affirmative Action

Chapter 6. Persecution: The Love Jihad Rumor

Conclusion. A More Equal Freedom

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Religious Freedom and the Right to Convert

Why has religious freedom advocacy in India restricted religious freedom? How can people on both sides of contentious debates over religious conversions draw on religious freedom arguments? The right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion in India’s constitution is one of the most comprehensive articulations of the right to change . . . religion or belief, a human right included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.¹ Yet from the late colonial era to the present, mass conversions to minority religions have inflamed majority-minority relations in India and complicated the practice of this right.

Currently, both defenders and critics of mass conversions in India base their arguments on the freedom of religion. While defenders (usually from religious minority communities, which include Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, and Jews) say the government should protect converts’ freedom to change religions, critics (usually from the Hindu majority community) respond that the government should protect converts’ freedom to remain in their ancestral religion. A growing number of state-level freedom-of-religion bills and laws restrict conversions.

At the heart of these controversies are different conversion narratives. Critics say mass converts are victims of overzealous proselytizers promising material benefits, but defenders insist the converts are agents choosing to convert for spiritual reasons. These lines of argument extend back to the 1930s and 1940s, when emerging human rights frameworks and early social scientific studies of religion each privileged a prototypical (but not at all typical) convert: an individual making a purely spiritual choice. India’s mass converts did not fit this model, sparking scrutiny of their individual agency and spiritual sincerity.

I trace this growing preoccupation with converts’ sincerity and agency through competing narratives about three mass conversion movements:

•Mass movement Christians in the 1930s

•Ambedkarite Buddhists in the 1950s

•Mizo Jews in the 2000s

Chapters on each of these movements show that social, political, or spatial mobility accompanied religious mobility. Mass conversion provided an important escape hatch for marginalized castes and tribes. But critics denied that such groups could decide for themselves to convert or, if conversion aided their mobility, argued that they were not converting for spiritual reasons. If oppressed, converts lacked agency; if overcoming oppression, they lacked sincerity. Each narrative undermined their religious freedom.

These mass conversion movements, and resulting narratives questioning converts’ sincerity and agency, set the stage for three central challenges undermining the human right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion in India today:

•Legislation limiting forcible and induced conversions

•Affirmative action for lower castes that excludes Muslims and Christians

•Rumors that Muslim men systematically seduce women to convert them

Chapters on each of these strategies illuminate how they immobilize potential converts and reinforce assumptions that women, Dalits (lowest castes), and Adivasis (indigenous tribes) inherently lack agency, or the ability and autonomy to decide to convert. Like denying their sincerity, denying the agency of converts has facilitated increasing restrictions on religious freedom in the name of protecting religious freedom.

By negating the agency of mass converts to minority religions, critics of conversion consider them the objects rather than the subjects of conversion. To convert in this transitive sense is an act done to someone else rather than by oneself.² Transitive conversion, or proselytism, is a more contested human right than the right to convert oneself.³ Examining the politics of mass conversion in India helps to explain a human rights conundrum: freedom of religion is so central that almost nine of every ten contemporary constitutions include it.⁴ Yet many living under these constitutions are not as religiously free as others. Religious freedoms are consistently promised, yet frequently denied.⁵

This chapter introduces my narrative approach to conversion politics, the book’s engagement with other scholarship, and the constitutional and human rights backdrop for religious freedom in India, with a focus on conversion rights. It introduces key terms (Dalit, Adivasi, and Hindu nationalism) and previews the subsequent chapters: case studies of historical and contemporary mass conversion movements, followed by analyses of particular legal and political anticonversion strategies. This trajectory of conversion rights in India is one articulation of religious freedom in practice. Neither a legal ideal awaiting full implementation nor an ideal way of life disconnected from the state, religious freedom is, rather, a specific, historically located technique of modern governance.⁶ Thus it demands specific, historically located study. This book features the governance of religious conversions in late colonial and contemporary India.

Conversion Narratives and Religious Freedom

Much of politics and the law is a contest of narratives.

—H. Porter Abbott⁷

Interpretive analysis, due to its research purpose of understanding meaning making in particular sites, is well suited to this inquiry, and conversion narratives provide fascinating source material for interpretation.⁸ Conversion narratives are a long-standing genre, typically converts’ testimonies about their own conversions. Such spiritual autobiography has played a prominent role within certain religious traditions: Puritans’ oral and print narratives of personal conversions and Quakers’ testimonies and proclamation tracts, both arising in the mid- seventeenth century, are examples of conversion narratives as religious practice.⁹ Conversion narratives also have been a valuable source for scholars of these and many other religions, including Catholicism,¹⁰ Islam,¹¹ Eastern Orthodox Christianity,¹² Buddhism, and more.¹³

My analysis of conversion narratives expands on the typical scope of such studies by including both converts’ narratives about themselves and other people’s narratives about converts. I contrast converts’ own perspectives on their mobility with the often patronizing assumptions about converts, women, and lower castes and the incendiary ideas about religious minorities embedded in other people’s narratives about converts and conversion. Even defenders of converts often reiterate and respond to the predominant critical narratives as they attempt to prove the sincerity or agency of converts.

We produce and consume narratives every day, and not just in literature, theater, or the arts. Politics, religion, and law are rich narrative sources, and narrative approaches offer several useful concepts to interpret these arenas. For instance, the texts of laws against forcible conversion, discussed in Chapter 4, invoke shadow stories about one of the most slippery aspects of law, motives.¹⁴ An incendiary rumor about conversions to Islam, discussed in Chapter 6, relies upon a masterplot, or story told again and again in various forms, tapping into our deepest values, wishes, and fears.¹⁵

In addition to tracing literary narrative techniques like shadow stories and masterplots, my narrative approach draws on the work of feminist political scientists. To challenge normalized representations, I adopt Cecelia Lynch’s method of tacking back and forth between dominant and alternative interpretations, by contrasting narratives about converts with narratives by them.¹⁶ Samantha Majic’s use of narrative in policy analysis is particularly germane. While recognizing that narrators and narratives vary in their power and influence, she shows how complex, individual narratives can complicate dominant stories, contest and inform policies, and, more specifically, challenge assumptions that women are duped innocents (a notion that frequently appears in predominant narratives about converts).¹⁷ In addition to tracing dominant stories that have become like eyeglasses we have worn a long time, I heed the critical race theorist Richard Delgado’s plea for counterstories that challenge a stock story and prepare the way for new one.¹⁸ The conclusion recommends the dissemination of counternarratives, or oppositionist storytelling, as one tool to achieve social justice in the realm of religious freedom.

Narrative sources discussed in this book start with India’s Constituent Assembly debates and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Subsequent chapters range from official to unofficial narratives, including state-level conversion laws, government forms, court decisions, politicians’ speeches, activists’ writings, archived documents, and various print, electronic, and social media representations of converts. Non-elite narratives include oral histories and missionary accounts.¹⁹ A few elite sources include voices from the margins, literally in the case of marginal notations by missionary survey researchers struggling with nonstandard responses by converts.

Why don’t I study conversion itself instead of what people are saying and writing about it? Interpretive political scientists recognize that language and the way it constructs meaning are central to politics; narratives constitute and shape governance. This interpretive (word-based, meaning focused) project approaches the study of politics through the lens of contested meanings.²⁰ Rather than judging whether converts are really converting, I consider why people are asking this question and how they are answering it. Craig Martin, discussing how to approach authenticity in the study of religion, asks "(1) Who is identified by (2) whom as (3) what, and (4) with what effects ?"²¹ In this spirit, rather than gauging authenticity, the following chapters interrogate who is identifying whom as authentic converts and focus on the emergence and use of sincerity and agency as markers of authenticity and the impact of these criteria on people’s lives.

Hence, this narrative focus does not mean that I ignore the material world; the deprivation, discrimination, or violence many people face remains central. How do conversion narratives relate to these problems in people’s lives? While also capturing competing or alternative narratives about conversions, the following chapters trace several predominant narratives about conversion and converts in contemporary India and the ways these narratives harm the rights of converts and minorities. My notion of predominant narratives is related to dominant interpretations, or meta-narratives, which are constructed and reproduced most frequently by those in power and shape what kinds of actions leaders and their publics are supposed to take; thus, they are key targets for critical reinterpretation.²²

Predominant narratives predominate in two senses: these are narratives that both prevail over time and emerge from dominant groups, which may vary depending on the level of analysis or historical period. Both Christian and Hindu elites, despite their distinct spiritual backgrounds, have repeatedly reinforced a predominant narrative that agency and sincerity are essential for real conversions, particularly when expressing their qualms about mass conversions. I focus on the 1930s to the present, when this narrative, which had roots before this period, took off in India. Predominant groups fortifying this narrative (and appearing in this book) include Christian missionaries, Hindu elites ranging from Mohandas Gandhi, known for his ecumenism, to current majoritarian Hindu nationalists, Jewish critics of immigration from India, and UN rapporteurs on freedom of religion or belief.

Predominant Narratives

predominate over time by predominant groups

Predominant narratives about converts and conversion undermine human rights in the following ways.

Predominant narratives about conversions privilege an idealized model of the convert as an individual freely choosing one faith out of a marketplace of beliefs. This emphasis on belief and individual choice is a Protestant-inflected ideal that does not even capture the experience of most Protestant converts. (How central is belief to people’s religious lives? How many converts convert in a social vacuum?) Under this narrative, group converts are suspect.

Predominant narratives about conversions create an implementation problem: how does one assess whether conversion is by force versus agency? Judges, bureaucrats, or others involved in the governance of religious freedom cannot read people’s minds. Too often their assessments are based on stereotypes about social groups: Christians bribe or induce converts; Muslims convert through force or seduction; women and lower castes or tribes are too gullible to convert freely.

Predominant narratives about conversions suggest that any social, political, or geographic mobility associated with conversion nullifies converts’ sincerity and thus their authentic right to convert. Most people convert for mixed reasons, including practical ones, and their conversions have multiple impacts on their subsequent lives.²³ Scrutiny of the motives of converts, particularly mass converts, can easily throw their sincerity into question if sincerity is equated with a purely spiritual choice.

Predominant narratives about conversions stigmatize certain religious minorities and favor religious majorities. Long-standing tropes of Muslims using force and Christians using inducements to achieve mass conversions mean that conversion-related political debates and laws disproportionately impact these groups. For instance, anticonversion laws (Chapter 4) give undue credence to rumors about conversions via force or allurement (such as the love jihad hysteria in India; see Chapter 6), exacerbating xenophobia and putting minority communities at risk. In contrast, activists of the Hindu Right evade scrutiny of group conversions by dubbing them homecomings (ghar wapsi) rather than conversions.

Predominant narratives about conversions suggest that some religions are inherently more conducive to religious freedom. Narratives about Hindu tolerance and Christian sincerity and agency associate these religions with religious freedom, leaving members of other religions struggling to fit into these models in order to exercise religious freedom.²⁴

Taking narratives seriously and all of these problems into account, I call for a more equal freedom, with the goal of protecting not just the rights of discrete religious groups but also the rights of people to convert between and among different groups. Current national and international laws and organizations are increasingly framing social difference through religious rights and freedoms, a trend that results in several negative outcomes, as articulated by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd in Beyond Religious Freedom: These efforts single out groups for legal protection as religious groups, mold religions into discrete faith communities with clean boundaries, clearly defined orthodoxies, and senior leaders who speak on their behalf, and privilege a modern liberal understanding of faith in ways that clash with lived religion.²⁵ From this longer list of problems, I focus on the ways predominant religious freedom narratives and related governance mold religions into discrete faith communities with clean boundaries and privilege a modern liberal understanding of faith.²⁶

While Hurd focuses on the dissenters, doubters . . . and nonorthodox, arguing that to fix religion in law . . . effaces the indeterminacy of evolving and contested sets of traditions, I will focus on another unbounded group, converts, revealing the disconnect between legal representations of discrete faith communities and the lives—and rights—of the converts who make leaps of faith between them.²⁷ Whereas Hurd critiques the new global politics of religion, I have a longer historical sweep and narrower geographic focus: India’s domestic politics of religious freedom from late-colonial social and constitutional debates up to contemporary state legislation, Supreme Court decisions, and anticonversion campaigns. Although the focus is India, transnational factors play a role in the practice of religious freedom related to conversion in India. Transnational factors and influences range from the deliberations of the UN’s Commission on Human Rights (discussed below) to an influential Methodist missionary from the United States in India (Chapter 1), a nongovernmental organization devoted to returning lost tribes to Israel (Chapter 3), and the texting application WhatsApp (Chapter 6).

This Project’s Engagement with Other Scholarship

Religious freedom and conversion politics in India are salient and contentious issues, inspiring both headlines and scholarly publications in recent years. Besides Hurd’s critique of the international politics of religious freedom, this project owes a huge debt to prior scholarly work on conversion in India. The literary scholar Gauri Viswanathan’s argument in Outside the Fold that conversion ranks among the most destabilizing activities in modern society is an inspiration for my examination of the social, political and spatial mobility of converts and the role of narrative in the practice of rights.²⁸ Like the law minister and Buddhist convert Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, I interpret this destabilization via conversion as a potentially positive outcome, a way to achieve equality through (rather than despite) religious freedom.²⁹ Rowena Robinson’s sociological research, including the volume Religious Conversion in India, reveals the wide range of conversion experiences in India, undermining assumptions that the only legitimate converts are individual, spiritual agents.³⁰

Rupa Viswanath’s The Pariah Problem draws on previously untapped archival sources to document the ways missionaries, social reformists, and colonial administrators cast caste, particularly untouchability, as a religious, rather than political or economic, problem. Brilliantly illustrating the way narratives impact material relations, Viswanath’s study shows how the narrative of caste as religious perpetuated the slavery of the lowest castes by absolving the state from responsibility and keeping post-1858 colonial officials from interfering—an example of religious freedom condoning unfreedom. Religious reform movements arose to solve the caste problem but never succeeded.³¹

One such reform movement features in The Limits of Tolerance: Indian Secularism and the Politics of Religious Freedom by C. S. Adcock, who focuses on the Arya Samaj in Punjab and the United Provinces in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with particular attention to the Gurukul Party, founded in 1901 by one faction of the Arya Samaj. Her study reveals the role of disputes over the Arya Samaj and shuddhi (sometimes translated as conversion or reconversion) in the development of the ideal of religious tolerance.³² Tolerance remains both prevalent and problematic in contemporary Hindu nationalist rhetoric, because it glosses over continuing religious and caste discrimination and oppression.

This book builds on these insightful literary, sociological, and historical accounts to address more recent politics, including current challenges to minorities, such as the revival of Hindu reconversion campaigns, as well as minority conversion movements to emancipate oppressed populations. For instance, the caste reforms critiqued by Viswanath and Adcock contrast with Ambedkar’s more radical approach, which will be the focus of Chapter 2. Ambedkar perceived religion as one of several dimensions of caste-based oppression in need of change. His attention to the intermingled material/spiritual bases of caste discrimination and the multiple modes of attack needed to annihilate caste are a focus of that chapter.

My findings complicate or deepen the work of other scholars. Rudolf C. Heredia’s Changing Gods: Rethinking Conversion in India is an accessible call for interfaith dialogue and an overview of notable individual conversions and mass conversions. His chapter on personal journeys includes theological and philosophical discussion of Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism;³³ in contrast, my Chapter 2 on Dalit Buddhists challenges the notion of conversion as a personal journey. That chapter’s oral histories of two of the thousands of people who converted along with Ambedkar show that solidarity was central to their experience. Goldie Osuri traces genealogies of conversion and anticonversion efforts through film and other narrative forms, making critical contributions to sovereignty studies within political philosophy and cultural studies. Her work is a valuable complement to my case studies of how specific conversion movements and particular predominant narratives about mass converts shaped subsequent political and legal anticonversion strategies.³⁴

My research challenges the conclusions of several scholars of religious freedom. Problematizing Religious Freedom by Arvind Sharma advances our understanding of the varied cultural foundations for religious freedom but fails to problematize an idealized notion of Hindu tolerance (debunked by Adcock’s historical work and my contemporary work) and does not scrutinize the discriminatory aspects of the politics of conversion in India.³⁵ While challenging predominant Western and Protestant notions of religious freedom, I do not substitute an idealized Hindu tolerance but instead examine the practical problems these ideals, whatever their origins, can cause for religious minorities and converts to a variety of religions. Not just Christian but also Hindu and Jewish critics of converts routinely deny their agency or sincerity and, thus, their religious freedom.

Several scholars have rejected religious freedom as inevitably discriminatory. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan’s United States–based work on the impossibility of religious freedom finds further support in her coedited volume documenting the many malfunctioning and discriminatory attempts to implement religious freedom around the world.³⁶ Due to the unstated and often opportunistic assumptions about what counts as religion—and, in my research, who counts as a convert—religious freedom may be impossible.³⁷ As Saba Mahmood points out, so far in modern Middle Eastern history, minorities constructed by state building, global geopolitics, and the freedom of religion itself (and supposedly the greatest beneficiaries of this freedom) have experienced a freedom that either (1) supported Christian proselytization or (2) served to consolidate the major-itarian ethos of the emergent modern state. This outcome, she argues, is not a misuse of an otherwise noble principle but is embedded in the conceptual architecture of the right to religious liberty itself and its global history.³⁸ My study traces this problematic conceptual architecture and global history in another context, India, but does not reject religious freedom altogether.

Sullivan et al. conclude: To continue to use the word [religion] in law is to invite discrimination.³⁹ I share their disenchantment with religious freedom, which seems to result in discrimination against women and various minorities whenever and wherever it appears. Yet I will not take a human right off the table when nondominant groups are finally gaining traction by using the concept.⁴⁰ The Dalit Buddhists (see Chapter 2) used the new constitutional right to freedom of conscience in their conversion movement, and the Dalit Christians and Muslims (see Chapter 5) also draw on this right in their claims for legal rights to jobs and university admissions for lower castes. I take to heart Sullivan’s skepticism of those in the academic world eager to offer their work as a how-to manual for government, given the religious right’s predominant narratives of religious freedom in the United States, India, and around the world.⁴¹ But rather than ceding the construction of religious freedom to the religious right by abandoning the concept as either impossible or fatally flawed, I conclude by considering the possibilities rather than the impossibility of religious freedom.

This book’s focus (on mass rather than individual conversions), scope (from late-colonial conversions through the present day), breadth (including women, lower castes, and several religious minorities), and analytical framework (conversion narratives and religious freedom) will, I hope, further contribute to the vibrant field of religious freedom and conversion politics. In the chapters that follow, I engage with the theoretical and empirical insights of the scholars mentioned above and others, including Arjun Appadurai, Talal Asad, Amrita Basu, Stephan Greenblat, Saba Mahmood, Martha Nussbaum, James C. Scott, and Meera Sehgal. After an introduction to conversion rights in India’s constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, both developed in the 1940s, an overview of the next chapters will set the stage for the arguments to come.

Religious Freedom and Conversion at the Inception of India’s Constitution

Article 25 of the Indian Constitution (1949)

(1) Subject to public order, morality and health and to the other provisions of this Part, all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion.

(2) Nothing in this article shall affect the operation of any existing law or prevent the State from making any law—

(a) regulating or restricting any economic, financial, political or other secular activity which may be associated with religious practice;

(b) providing for social welfare and reform or the throwing open of Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all classes and sections of Hindus.

Explanation I.—The wearing and carrying of kirpans shall be deemed to be included in the profession of the Sikh religion.

Explanation II.—In sub-clause (b) of clause (2), the reference to Hindus shall be construed as including a reference to persons professing the Sikh, Jaina or Buddhist religion, and the reference to Hindu religious institutions shall be construed accordingly.⁴²

India’s constitution came into effect in 1950 and is still (with many amendments) the law of the land today. The constitution emerged from heated debates in the Constituent Assembly, which met periodically from 1946 until it adopted the constitution in 1949. Thus, conversion rights and religious freedoms emerged in India against the backdrop of the developing Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Rather than a comprehensive examination of Indian constitutional law on religious freedom, the following is a discussion of Article 25 and the Constituent Assembly debates.⁴³ Conversion debates included the threat of coerced conversion, the role of religious propagation, and the association of particular minority communities with each of these practices.

Ultimately, the Constituent Assembly adopted the following religious freedom clause (Article 25, clause 1): Subject to public order, morality and health and to the other provisions of this Part, all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right to freely profess, practice and propagate religion. India’s religious freedom clause has typical caveats (public order, morality, and health) but also wide-ranging protected activities (to profess, practice, and propagate). The former provide many reasons to restrict religious freedom, while the latter provide a broad right to freely practice religion, thus setting up tensions, such as challenges to propagation in the name of preserving public order (one subject of Chapter 4). Order is a conservative concept, preserving relations of dominance: The legal concept of public order privileges the beliefs, values, and practices of the majority religious tradition in any given polity.⁴⁴

Clause 2 addresses minority rights that complicate the practice of religious freedom in India. Clause 2(b) says this article shall not prevent the state from providing for social welfare and reform or the throwing open of Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all classes and sections of Hindus. Although avoiding the term caste, this clause alludes to caste discrimination, mentions the role of the state and religious institutions in social reforms pertaining to caste (elaborated upon in Chapters 1, 2, and 5), and implies that caste is a Hindu phenomenon (contested in Chapter 5).

Later in this same constitutional clause, a telling phrase—the reference to Hindus shall be construed as including a reference to persons professing the Sikh, Jaina or Buddhist religion—clarified the boundaries of religions in ways that impacted legal and political definitions of conversion for years to come.⁴⁵ Conceptualizing Buddhists as a sect of Hinduism, for instance, could defuse the radical mass conversion to Buddhism from Hinduism featured in Chapter 2. This phrase also made it easier to open the Scheduled Caste category (eligible for government policies benefitting lower castes) to Sikhs and Buddhists, while excluding Muslims and Christians (Chapter 5). Contemporary Hindu nationalists deny that conversions to Hinduism are conversions at all but are, rather, homecomings (Chapter 4), a stance bolstered by this constitutional clause, which supersizes Hinduism to include other religions that most adherents would consider distinct.⁴⁶

The Constituent Assembly’s Advisory Committee on Fundamental Rights considered various clauses relating to freedom of religion, including one about coercion: Conversion from one religion to another brought about by coercion or undue influence shall not be recognised by law. This proposal shows that concerns about forced or induced conversions were on the minds of Constituent Assembly members following the controversies over mass movement conversions to Christianity by largely lower-caste communities. The chairman of the Constituent Assembly Advisory Committee, Sardar Vallabhbhai J. Patel, explained that they rejected this proposed clause as unnecessary in light of the more general clause chosen, reporting, The Committee came to the conclusion that this general clause is enough so far as fundamental rights are concerned. On further consideration this clause seemed to us to enunciate a rather obvious doctrine which it was unnecessary to include in the constitution, and we thought it better to leave it to the legislature.⁴⁷ State legislatures did pass laws against forcible or induced conversion.

One of the most contested words in the Constituent Assembly deliberations was the word propagate. Even supporters of including the verb propagate among the religious freedoms made a point of distinguishing it from convert, especially in the context of mass conversions. As the Constituent Assembly member Shri K. Santhanam, a Tamil Brahmin, argued:

Propagation is merely freedom of expression. I would like to point out that the word convert is not there. Mass conversion was part of the activities of the Christian Missionaries in this country and great objection has been taken by the people to that. (Those who drafted this Constitution have taken care to see that no unlimited right of conversion has been given. People have freedom of conscience and, if any man is converted voluntarily owing to freedom of conscience, then well and good. . . . But if any attempt is made by one religious community or another to have mass conversions through undue influence either by money or pressure or other means, the State has every right to regulate such activity).⁴⁸

Santhanam’s reference to money or pressure indicates continuing concern about coercion and foreshadows the induced- or forced-conversion laws to come.

The Constituent Assembly debates include earlier articulations of present-day rhetoric about Muslim and Christian converts, in particular efforts to link the former with coercion and the latter with inducement. One Hindu critic of the right to propagate, the Constituent Assembly member Lokanath Misra, argued that this right applied only to Christians and Muslims, who would over run Hindus:

Vedic culture excludes nothing. . . . In the present context what can this word propagation in article 19 mean? It can only mean paving the way for the complete annihilation of Hindu culture, the Hindu way of life and manners. Islam has declared its hostility to Hindu thought. Christianity has worked out the policy of peaceful penetration by the back-door on the outskirts of our social life. . . .

Indeed in no constitution of the world right to propagate religion is a fundamental right and justiciable. . . .

. . . Let not the Constitution put it as a fundamental right and encourage it.⁴⁹

Thus Misra associated Hinduism with no conversions (Vedic culture excludes nothing), Islam with forced conversions (Islam has declared its hostility), and Christianity with induced conversions (peaceful penetration . . . on the outskirts of our social life—an apparent allusion to the lower caste mass movement Christians). Despite Misra’s arguments, the right to propagate made it into the constitution. The Constituent Assembly, through open debates, repeatedly rejected some majoritarian arguments.⁵⁰

Yet innuendos similar to Misra’s persist in contemporary anticonversion and anti-minority narratives. For instance, Ratna Kapur has traced the Hindu Right’s rearticulation of religious freedom and the sway of their interpretations in recent Supreme Court decisions over the use of religious appeals in political campaigns and the dispute over a religious site in Ayodhya: Through the Hindu Right’s construction of Hinduism as the truly tolerant religion, the right of religious minorities to profess and propagate their ‘intolerant’ religions is cast as a violation of freedom of religion.⁵¹ The Hindu Right has argued that, unlike Christianity and Islam, Hinduism is the only religion in India that is committed to the value of religious tolerance because it does not aim to proselytize or gain converts. According to this logic, then, since secularism is about toleration and only Hindus are tolerant, then only Hindus are truly secular.⁵² In this way, the narratives of the Hindi Right twist religious freedom (and allied principles like secularism and toleration) to reproduce and reinforce Hindu majoritarianism.⁵³ My critique of ghar wapsi and reconversion in Chapters 4 and 5 challenges the majoritarian premise that Hindus do not proselytize or convert.

India’s constitutional debates introduced or amplified persistent narratives about minorities and conversions. The Constituent Assembly members Misra (speaking against the right to propagate) and Santhanam (defending the right to propagate) both portrayed minorities as a threat to freedom of conscience due to conversions, particularly mass conversions. This has become a predominant narrative. Absorbing Jains, Sikhs, and Buddhists into Hinduism in Article 25(2b) is another. These predominant narratives set the stage for additional laws limiting conversion (Chapter 4), legal interpretations restricting the rights of converts from Hinduism (Chapter 5), and negative political and social media campaigns about Muslim conversions and converts (Chapter 6), which have been detrimental to lower castes and religious minorities in India.

Yet one of India’s most famous converts, B. R. Ambedkar, was also the chief architect of India’s constitution as chair of the Drafting Committee. A few years after completing the Indian Constitution, Ambedkar led a mass conversion of lower castes to Buddhism (Chapter 2). What was his proposed constitutional language on religious freedom? His Memorandum and Draft Articles on the Rights of States and Minorities, which he submitted to the Sub-Committee on Fundamental Rights on March 24, 1947, included the right to convert and a non-establishment clause. Neither of these appeared in the constitution, but they speak to Ambedkar’s core concerns and goals.⁵⁴ His non-establishment proposal reflected his longstanding apprehension that elite Hindus would dominate India after independence. Unlike some of his colleagues in the Constituent Assembly quoted above, Ambedkar did not recoil from the word convert. He had already decided to convert from Hinduism and was contemplating which religion he and his followers would embrace.

Ambedkar did not endorse unfettered freedom; freedom became a subsidiary concern with the end of colonial rule and the dawn of a democratically elected legislative system.⁵⁵ India’s transformational constitutionalism included a commitment to equality as central to (not competing with) freedom. Transformational constitutionalism, in the words of Sandipto Dasgupta, meant that freedom from colonial domination was not merely a question of ascribing hitherto unavailable political rights to citizens, but also one of correcting the abject conditions of poverty, underdevelopment, and inequality bestowed by colonial policies.⁵⁶ This transformational project counters narrow conceptions of religious or any other freedoms standing in the way of progress toward equality or a more equal freedom.⁵⁷

Religious Freedom and Conversion in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his