He was delivering the Dr Stanley Samartha Memorial Lecture-2007 on "The Right to Convert and the Indian Constitution", jointly organised by the Bangalore Initiative for Religious Dialogue (BIRD), St Mark’s Cathedral and YMCA Bangalore at St Mark’s Cathedral.

He said that even Emperor Akbar’s new religion “Din Ilahi” based on the principles of various religions died out with his death bringing out the stark truth that no religion in the world is perfect by itself.

He said, “the Christians appear to believe that they can afford to ignore or disobey the rest of the teachings and commandments of Jesus Christ relating to social justice, but they should implicitly follow the mandate of conversion because it would result in increase in the strength of the Christian population. What Christians have is only a small portion of the vast area of teachings and preaching made by Jesus Christ recorded in four small books called gospels. Christian religion, as we know it now, is quite imperfect because we know only a fraction of what Jesus himself said or did.”

Conversions
Justice Thomas said that conversions from Hinduism to Buddhism, Jainism or Sikhism has never created problem in India because they are Indian originated religions, but problems arose only when such conversion is made from Hindu religion to semitic (Abrahamic) religions - Christianity, Islamic and Jewish.
Besides conversion from Hinduism to these semitic religions calls for a change in laws relating to inheritance of property and marriage, he added.

Justice Thomas said that there were four different occasions when conversion from Hindu religion was first raised as a political or legal question - first when the Indian Constitution was made, second was in 1956 when Justice Niyogi Commission report was published containing a recommendation tha foreign missionaries shall be banned in India and also to impose statutory restrictions against conversion, the third occasion was in 1967-68 when the Congress governments of Orissa and and Madhya Pradesh passed legislations imposing penal provisions against conversion by allurement and fraud. The fourth was in the recent past when some of the BJP state governments and the AIDMK government in Tamil Nadu brought similar legislations, he added.

However, he emphaised that, there has been no legislation which has imposed any restriction on conversion if it is done by one’s own free will. For instance, he said,  conversion was made an offense in the Orissa and MP Act and even the Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court held that none of the provisions was unconstitutional.