THE REPORTED DECISION of some churches in Maharashtra to obtain written declarations from worshippers affirming that they attended prayer meetings voluntarily reflects more than legal caution. It exposes a larger constitutional tension on whether the State can prevent coercive or fraudulent conversion without making every religious choice appear suspect.
The Maharashtra Freedom of Religion Act, 2026, which came into force on August 28, 2026, prohibits conversion through force, coercion, deceit, misrepresentation, threats, undue influence, inducement and fraudulent means. It also establishes procedures for proposed conversions, including prior notice and post-conversion declarations. The State plainly has a legitimate interest in protecting people from fraud, coercion and exploitation. The Supreme Court recognised this principle in Rev. Stainislaus v. State of Madhya Pradesh (1977), holding that Article 25 does not create a fundamental right to convert another person through force or fraud.
That principle, however, does not resolve every constitutional question. The crucial distinction is between the unlawful method by which a conversion may be secured and the individual’s voluntary decision to change faith pursued by them. Article 25 begins with the “freedom of conscience”. Those words place the individual, not the State or a religious institution, at the centre of the constitutional guarantee.
What the law regulates
The Act adopts a broad definition of “unlawful conversion”. It covers not only force and deception but also allurement, undue influence, fraudulent means and “brainwashing through the medium of education or by any other such means”. “Allurement” includes gifts, material benefits, employment, free education in institutions run by religious bodies, promises of marriage, a “better lifestyle”, divine healing, and portraying or glorifying one religion over another.
Section 3 prohibits conversion or attempted conversion through these means and extends liability to assistance, abetment and conspiracy. A conversion contrary to the Act is treated as an offence and declared void. Section 6 requires the proposed convert and the person or institution organising the ceremony to provide 60 days’ prior notice to the competent authority (District Magistrate). The proposed conversion may then be publicly displayed, objections may be invited and a police inquiry may examine its intention, purpose or cause.
Section 7 requires post-conversion declarations within 21 days, containing extensive personal details, including the person’s name, age, address, parents’ and spouse’s names, previous and new religions, and the date, place and manner of conversion. Non-compliance renders the conversion void under the Act. The offences are cognisable and non-bailable, triable by a Court of Sessions. Section 13 also places the burden of establishing that the conversion was lawful on the person who caused it and anyone who aided or abetted it.
These provisions warrant careful constitutional scrutiny, not because the State lacks power to prevent unlawful conduct, but because the regulatory framework enters a domain closely connected to privacy, dignity, and personal autonomy.
Prayer is not conversion
The reported decision of some churches and prayer groups in Maharashtra to obtain written declarations from worshippers affirming that their attendance is voluntary is significant not because such declarations conclusively establish anything about conversion, but because they reveal the behavioural consequences of a broad and potentially coercive regulatory framework. The constitutional concern therefore extends beyond the narrow question whether attendance at a prayer meeting can legally amount to conversion. The deeper question is what happens to religious freedom when religious institutions begin to reorganise their ordinary practices primarily to protect themselves against the possibility of being accused under a statute by the provisions of which criminal cases can be filed.
A person may attend a service out of curiosity, friendship, intellectual interest, personal faith or a desire to pray. Listening to a sermon or reading religious literature does not necessarily mean that a person has renounced one religion and adopted another. A Hindu attending a church service has not automatically become a Christian; a Christian visiting a temple has not necessarily become a Hindu; and a Muslim attending a Buddhist meditation programme has not thereby changed faith.
Religious association and religious conversion are not identical. If enforcement blurs that distinction, the law may discourage legitimate religious dialogue, inquiry and participation. An anti-conversion statute should target prohibited conduct, not ordinary interaction among citizens of different faiths.
This distinction between adjudicative consequence and procedural consequence deserves greater constitutional attention. The ultimate question before a Court may be whether a particular conversion was in fact brought about by force, fraud, coercion, undue influence or inducement. But for the individual or institution concerned, the burden may arise much before that question is judicially answered. A complaint may trigger inquiry; an inquiry may require disclosure of personal information; a religious gathering may be disrupted; an institution may have to explain its activities; and individuals may become reluctant to participate in religious programmes. Even if the eventual conclusion is that no unlawful conversion occurred, the intervening process may itself have imposed a substantial burden upon privacy, reputation, associational freedom and religious exercise.
This is particularly significant for minority religious institutions. Their concern is not necessarily, and should not be caricatured as an objection to the State protecting vulnerable persons from coercion or fraud. Such protection is constitutionally legitimate. The anxiety arises from the possibility that broadly worded provisions may generate allegations on the basis of ordinary and routine religious activity, particularly where the boundaries between charitable service, religious teaching, prayer and unlawful inducement are not carefully maintained. The resulting uncertainty can encourage institutions to police their own conduct beyond what the statute strictly requires, not because they accept that their activities are unlawful, but because the cost of defending an allegation may itself be substantial.
The phenomenon is therefore better understood as self-regulation induced by regulatory uncertainty. In a constitutional democracy, self-regulation is ordinarily unobjectionable when it reflects responsible institutional governance. It becomes more troubling when it is substantially motivated by fear of criminal proceedings or by the anticipation that ordinary religious activity may be misconstrued. If churches feel compelled to obtain declarations merely to establish that individuals came voluntarily to pray, the constitutional burden has arguably shifted: the citizen is no longer simply exercising freedom of conscience; the citizen is being placed in a position where the exercise of that freedom must be documented as voluntary.
That possibility is precisely why “prayer is not conversion” should not remain a semantic proposition. It must operate as a constitutional principle. The State may legitimately prohibit conversion obtained through force, fraud or coercion. It may investigate credible allegations that such prohibited means have been employed. But it must not create a regulatory environment in which the ordinary act of attending a religious gathering becomes presumptively suspicious merely because the gathering is associated with a minority faith.
Ultimately, the principle that prayer is not conversion is not a defence of any particular religion or institution. It is a defence of constitutional categories. Prayer belongs to the sphere of religious exercise; inquiry belongs to the sphere of conscience; association belongs to the sphere of personal liberty; and conversion, where genuinely voluntary, belongs to the sphere of individual autonomy. Criminal law may intervene when these freedoms are manipulated through coercion, fraud or other prohibited means. But it must intervene because of the unlawful means employed, not merely because a person prayed, listened, associated, received assistance or ultimately chose to change faith.
Protection or surveillance?
A more serious concern arises when precautionary declarations become a means of collecting extensive personal information. Requiring photographs, Aadhaar or PAN details merely to attend a prayer meeting would raise questions of necessity, purpose and proportionality.
In Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017), the Supreme Court recognised privacy as encompassing dignity, autonomy and control over intimate aspects of personal life. Religious affiliation and practice fall close to the core of that protected sphere. Information about where a person worships, which religious literature they read or which gatherings they attend may reveal deeply personal matters of conscience.
The relevant questions are therefore whether the information is necessary? Who may access it? How long will it be retained? Can it be shared with law-enforcement agencies? What safeguards prevent misuse? A law designed to protect people from coercion should not produce a culture in which citizens must document their religious conduct to demonstrate innocence. Religious institutions, in order to adopt proportionate compliance measures, are pressured into collecting sensitive information unrelated to a specific legal purpose.
The problem of prior notice
Within the Act, a person who has made a deeply personal decision to change religion must disclose that intention in advance through a 60-day prior-notice. The information may be publicly displayed, objections may be invited and a police inquiry may follow. This is a constitutionally sensitive feature.
The State may investigate credible allegations of fraud, coercion or undue influence. The more difficult question is whether every voluntary conversion should first be subjected to administrative scrutiny, even when there is no concrete indication of illegality. Regulating unlawful conduct is different from placing the exercise of a fundamental freedom under prior suspicion.
A constitutional system should focus on whether the decision was free, informed and voluntary and not whether the State approves of the belief chosen. This protection extends to a person who changes religion, remains within a religion or rejects religion altogether.
Allurement and charitable work
The breadth of the definition of “allurement” also requires careful interpretation. Terms such as “better lifestyle” and “divine healing” may address deceptive or manipulative practices, but they can also be vague if detached from a specific intention to procure conversion.
Religious organisations frequently run schools, hospitals, shelters, orphanages and charitable programmes. Providing free education or medical assistance is not, by itself, proof of an unlawful religious bargain. The legal inquiry should examine whether the benefit was offered conditionally, whether a representation was false or deceptive, and whether the conduct was deliberately used to secure conversion.
Free education is not the same as education offered only in exchange for conversion. Medical assistance is not equivalent to making treatment conditional on a change of faith. Spiritual counselling is not the same as threatening a person with divine punishment unless they convert. The law must preserve these distinctions or risk criminalising ordinary charitable activity.
Reverse burden and chilling effects
Section 13’s reverse burden is particularly consequential because it departs from the ordinary presumption of innocence. Such provisions may exist in Indian criminal law, but they require disciplined application. The prosecution should first establish credible foundational facts indicating that one of the prohibited means was used. A bare allegation, religious disagreement or attendance at a prayer meeting should not be enough to shift the burden.
Criminal law can affect behaviour even before conviction. A pastor may hesitate to invite people of other faiths to a prayer meeting. A charity may withdraw from assisting vulnerable families. An individual may avoid religious gatherings or postpone a change of faith because the decision could become public. This is the chilling effect that constitutional courts must consider alongside the statute’s formal neutrality.
The State must also prevent private vigilantism. Allegations of coercive or fraudulent conversion should be investigated by the police and decided by courts and not by self-appointed religious groups disrupting meetings, intimidating worshippers or conducting parallel investigations. An anti-conversion law must not become a legal vocabulary for policing religious minorities or inter-faith activity.
The recent Pune episode illustrates why procedural discipline matters. Police initially invoked provisions of the Act in two cases before its formal commencement and later removed those provisions after August 28 was notified as the effective date. The episode underscores how statutes with provisions that can be used to attract criminal liability can be applied with the intent of prosecution without consideration to whether they are legally operative, and whether the allegations have been handled with precision.
Recent Developments in Goa
The recent developments in Goa provide a useful comparative illustration of this broader concern. The Goa Cabinet approved the proposed Goa Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Bill, 2026, which contemplated stringent penalties and, among other provisions, a 60-day prior declaration by a person intending to change religion. The Bill, however, was not introduced during the current Assembly session after opposition from legislators, including members of the ruling establishment, who called for greater examination and consultation. The significance of this development lies not merely in the political fate of one proposed law, but in the recognition that legislation dealing with religious conversion can have consequences extending beyond the adjudication of individual cases. It can affect the relationship of trust between religious communities, the manner in which institutions conduct their ordinary activities and the willingness of individuals to participate openly in religious and inter-faith spaces.
The experience in Maharashtra makes this concern particularly immediate. It is the regulatory architecture that has created such a degree of uncertainty that minority institutions feel compelled to create documentary safeguards around conduct that, in ordinary constitutional circumstances, would be regarded as an uncomplicated exercise of religious freedom.
This does not mean that every precaution adopted by a religious institution is constitutionally objectionable. Institutions are entitled to develop reasonable compliance mechanisms, particularly when legislation imposes genuine legal obligations. Nor should the legitimate anxieties of persons vulnerable to coercion, deception or exploitation be minimised. The constitutional balance requires both concerns to be taken seriously. The question is whether institutional precautions remain proportionate to compliance measures or gradually become a system of self-surveillance in which individuals must repeatedly establish that their religious choices are independent and voluntary.
The distinction is especially important because freedom of conscience protects not only the final decision to adopt or reject a faith but also the intellectual and spiritual journey by which an individual arrives at that decision. Religious inquiry necessarily involves exposure to unfamiliar ideas, conversations with believers of other faiths, participation in religious gatherings and engagement with competing claims about truth. A legal framework that makes such encounters inherently risky may indirectly burden the very freedom of conscience that the Constitution seeks to protect.
The State must therefore distinguish between protecting an individual from coercion and protecting an individual from making a choice with which the State, a family member, a religious group or a community may disagree. These are not the same objectives. The former is a legitimate function of criminal law; the latter would amount to an impermissible intrusion into conscience and personal autonomy.
The more nuanced constitutional inquiry is consequently not whether the State may regulate unlawful conversion, it plainly may, subject to constitutional limitations, but whether the regulatory mechanism is sufficiently precise to ensure that the prevention of coercion does not produce a climate in which lawful religious participation is treated as evidence of unlawful conversion. The legitimacy of the law must be assessed not merely by examining the cases in which convictions may eventually be secured, but also by examining the behaviour it induces in the meantime.
A constitutional democracy must be particularly attentive to this process burden. If a person ultimately accused of coercive conversion is acquitted, the acquittal does not necessarily erase the disruption, stigma, investigation, disclosure of personal information or institutional consequences that may have occurred in the intervening period. Similarly, if a religious institution ultimately establishes that no unlawful conversion took place, the fact that it felt compelled to collect declarations from worshippers may itself demonstrate the chilling effect produced by legal uncertainty.
The constitutional safeguard, therefore, must operate at the threshold as well as at the point of final adjudication. Complaints should be founded upon specific and credible allegations of prohibited conduct rather than upon the mere occurrence of prayer, preaching, charitable assistance or inter-faith participation. Investigative authorities must distinguish between evidence of conversion and evidence of ordinary religious association. Religious institutions, for their part, should adopt proportionate compliance mechanisms without converting places of worship into documentary checkpoints where individuals are required to establish their innocence before participating in prayer.
The real constitutional challenge, therefore, is to ensure that a law intended to protect vulnerable individuals does not inadvertently produce a culture in which religious minorities regulate themselves out of fear, individuals document their faith choices for their own protection, and ordinary religious interaction is approached as a potential criminal liability. The success of an anti-conversion framework should not be measured only by how effectively it detects unlawful conversions. It should also be measured by whether an individual remains genuinely free to pray, inquire, associate and believe without first having to prove that the exercise of that freedom is innocent.
A Constitutional Approach
The Act need not be viewed through a binary choice between supporting conversion and opposing regulation. A constitutionally sound approach would require: Firm prosecution of force, fraud, coercion and deliberate exploitation of vulnerability; A clear distinction between religious propagation, religious participation and conversion; Recognition that attendance at a religious service is not, by itself, evidence of conversion; Investigation based on specific, credible material rather than on a person’s change of faith alone; Application of the reverse burden only after the prosecution establishes foundational facts; Protection of adults’ privacy when they exercise freedom of conscience; Collection of only information that is necessary, proportionate and legally justified; Police training that treats the Act as a criminal statute, not as a tool for supervising belief; Firm action against vigilantism and intimidation by private groups.
The Constitutional Principle
The controversy over consent forms reveals a paradox. A law enacted to protect freedom of religion may, if administered excessively, require people to prove that they are exercising that freedom voluntarily.
The State may prevent forced or fraudulent conversion. It may punish the exploitation of vulnerability. It may investigate credible evidence of unlawful conduct. It cannot presume that a change of religion is itself evidence of fraud, treat poverty as proof that a choice was not genuine or convert religious spaces into locations where citizens must establish their innocence before they pray.
India’s constitutional vision is neither a theocracy nor hostility towards religion. It is an order in which the State maintains principled neutrality among faiths while protecting the equal liberty of individuals. But it must never acquire the power to regulate the conscience itself. The ultimate test is therefore freedom of conscience: whether a person may say, “This is what I believe. I have chosen it freely. Unless I have violated another person’s rights or the law, that choice belongs to me.” The Constitution protects the freedom to believe. It does not—and should not—give the State power to decide what that belief must be.
“ A free conscience does not ask the State what it may believe. But when conscience must produce evidence of its freedom, are we still protecting liberty or merely licensing it ? ”
In Volume 17 and Part III of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, his ideas on egalitarian revolution have been outlined. In that volume there is a chapter titled “Conversion is Necessary for your Emancipation and Advancement”. In that chapter, it is stated that on May 17, 1936, while addressing an assembly of the untouchables of East & South of Thane District at Kalyan he very emphatically remarked, ‘ If I continue to remain an Untouchable, I can attain any position that a Hindu can. Whether I remain a Hindu or not, it makes little difference to me. I can become a Judge of the High Court, a Member of the Legislative Assembly or even a Minister.” “But,” he asserted with conviction “it is for your emancipation and advancement, that conversion appears to be very necessary to me.” Could Ambedkar have been able to summon such courage to say “Conversion is Necessary for your Emancipation and Advancement” under the Maharashtra Freedom of Religion Act, 2026?
This article is an attempt to examine the said Act from a constitutional and legal-policy perspective. It is intended for academic and public discussion and does not prejudge the constitutional validity of any provision, which remains subject to judicial scrutiny.
