Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs
- Recently, the Haryana government released the draft of the Haryana Prevention of Unlawful Conversion of Religious Bill, 2022.
- The bill aims at prohibiting religious conversions which are affected through misrepresentation, force, undue influence, coercion, allurement or by any fraudulent means or by marriage or for marriage by making it an offense.
- Other States like Karnataka, Arunachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand have also passed laws restricting religious conversion.
Need for Anti-Conversion Laws
- The Constitution confers on each individual the fundamental right to profess, practice and propagate his religion.
- The individual right to freedom of conscience and religion cannot be extended to construe a collective right to proselytize.
- For the right to religious freedom belongs equally to the person converting and the individual sought to be converted.
- In the recent past, several instances have come to the notice that whereby people marry persons of other religion by either misrepresentation or concealment of their own religion and after getting married they force such other person to convert to their own religion.
- Recently, the Supreme Court also took judicial notice of such instances.
- According to the court, such incidents not only infringe the freedom of religion of the persons so converted but also militate against the secular fabric of our society.
Provisions of the Draft Bill
- The Bill provides for greater punishment for such conversions in respect of minors, women, Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes.
- It also provides that the burden of proof as to whether a conversion was not affected through misrepresentation, use of force, under threat, undue influence, coercion, allurement or by any fraudulent means or by marriage or for marriage for the purpose of carrying out conversion lies on the accused.
- Every individual converting from one religion to another shall submit to the prescribed authority a declaration that the conversion affected through was not by any fraudulent means.
- Besides, it provides for declaring marriages null and void, which were solemnized by concealment of religion.
Supreme Court Judgements on Marriage and Conversion
Hadiya Judgement 2017:
- Matters of dress and of food, of ideas and ideologies, of love and partnership are within the central aspects of identity.
- Neither the State nor the law can dictate a choice of partners or limit the free ability of every person to decide on these matters.
- The principle that the right to marry a person of one’s choice is integral to Article 21.
K.S. Puttaswamy or ‘privacy’ Judgment 2017:
Autonomy of the individual was the ability to make decisions in vital matters of concern to life.
Way Forward
The governments implementing such laws need to ensure that these do not curb one’s Fundamental Rights or hamper the national integration instead, these laws need to strike a balance between freedoms and malafide conversions.
SOURCE: THE HINDU,THE ECONOMIC TIMES,MINT
