Supreme Court notice to Centre over fraudulent religious conversion

The top court asked the parties to file a reply by November 14

The Supreme Court on Friday issued notice to the Centre on a PIL, seeking a direction to control fraudulent religious conversion and those carried out by intimidation, threat, deceit, and through gifts and monetary benefits.

A bench of Justices M R Shah and Krishna Murari agreed to examine the matter after hearing advocate-petitioner Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay.

The court said, it is a serious matter and sought a reply from the Union government's Ministries of Law and Home to the petition. It put the matter for consideration in November.

The petitioner claimed the situation is alarming as many individuals and organisations are carrying mass conversions of SC-STs in rural areas for the last two decades.

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The plea said that religious conversion by “hook and crook” and by “the carrot and the stick” is not the problem of Delhi only but a pan India problem. Therefore, it is the duty of the Centre to take steps to prohibit it nationwide.

Since the penal law does not cover religious conversion, many States have become the safe place for foreign funded individuals, NGOs and missionaries and they have established their offices even in Delhi (Okhla, Jamia Nagar, Batla House, Kali Bari Marg etc).

Citing alleged suicide by 17-year-old girl, Lavanya on January 19, in Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu, the petitioner filed the plea, claiming the Centre and States have failed to control menace of deceitful religious conversion, though it is their duty under Articles 14, 21, 25 of the Constitution.

"Lavanya’s untimely demise is a wake-up call. It reminds people of evangelists’ imperialistic goals. Indeed, it reminds people of how an elaborate plan has been used to uproot Hinduism-Secularism. In fact, many more Lavanyas have been compelled to take such drastic measures as a result of such coercive-persuasive tactics," the plea contended.

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The plea said Article 25 protects right of all persons to enjoy a freedom of conscience, necessarily implying, freedom without intimidation, threat, undue coercion or misguided material lure.

"But Article 25 is denuded of its content when the State fails to adopt and implement sufficient measures to ensure that unlawful, coercive and forceful conversions are prohibited," it said.

The ignominy of having to lose one’s freedom of conscience on illicit lures of material benefits, is the ultimate exploitation which the Constitution surely does not envisage protected under Article 25, it added.