Freedom to practice a religion is impossible to separate from the right to renounce it, and to replace it with another faith, or no faith at all. Otherwise we would all be stuck with the belief system we adopted, without exercising mature choice, as children, which is no freedom at all.

Article 25 (1) of India’s Constitution assures us that “all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion”. Yet, a number of states, beginning with Orissa as early as 1967 and Madhya Pradesh in 1968, have adopted legislation which makes changing one’s religion extremely difficult. Don’t be fooled by propagandists who claim such laws only prevent forced conversion: they go much further than that, placing religious choice at the mercy of bureaucrats and policemen.

Unfortunately, when the Supreme Court ruled in 1977 on a challenge to one such state law, it concluded that, “The word 'propagate' has been used  in the Article as meaning to transmit or spread from person  to person or from place to place. The Article does not  grant right to convert other person to one's own religion but to transmit  or spread one's religion by an exposition of its tenets.”

Illogical stand

This seems to me to be an entirely illogical stand. It is the equivalent of saying a particular product is legal to own, I have the right to advertise it, and a prospective buyer has the right to purchase it, but I have no right to sell it. Just as the purpose of advertising a product is to sell, it, the purpose of propagating a faith is to convert people to it. Since Article 25 (1) allows propagation, it implicitly allows conversion.

I am unambiguously against laws restricting proselytising, which have been introduced for the most part by Bharatiya Janata Party governments but occasionally by Centrist parties including the Congress. However, I believe conversions should be legal in the way I believe cigarettes should be legal: Saying people ought to be allowed to smoke is rather different from saying cigarettes are healthy or do much for the common good.

Being an atheist, it goes without saying I believe all religious doctrine to be false. Conversion, from this perspective, is persuading someone to switch from one false belief to another equally false one, and I don’t see any intrinsic worth in that. Conversion appears to produce very little material change among the converted. How much difference has it made to the Human Development Index rankings of Papua New Guinea, Rwanda and Haiti that over nine out of 10 of their citizens have given up most of their traditional beliefs in favour of Christianity? Perhaps it seemed to Indians in the past that Abrahamic religions offered an escape from the inequities of caste, but that hope has proved illusory.

Furthermore, I’m troubled by the uneven playing field between the world’s two most successful proselytising creeds, Christianity and Islam, and faiths that do not desire to prove their own superiority and convert others to their cause. It can be said in favour of Christian missionaries that they have set up thousands of schools and charitable organisations, whose services are availed off by a wider population than their immediate targets for conversion. But that kind of social work is largely missing in the case of Islamic preaching.

Unfair game

It doesn’t help that the strain of Islam that’s popular with contemporary evangelists, funded by Saudi Arabia and oil-rich Gulf monarchies, is deeply illiberal and unfair to women. Yet another point against Islam is that the faith doesn’t play fair in the conversion game. While it assiduously seeks out new converts, it brands as apostates any Muslims abandoning the faith, a crime punishable by death. In other words, Muslim preachers and nations take advantage of the possibilities offered by freedom of religion in liberal countries without in any way actually accepting that religious faith should be a matter of free choice.

These thoughts are prompted, of course, by the shambolic ghar wapasi ceremonies undertaken by Sangh Parivaris. I really can’t understand why RSS pracharaks are getting their khaki knickers in such a twist over conversions. The Christian population of India, as a percentage of the total, has fallen marginally in the past few decades. The Muslim population’s increased, but only by a couple of percentage points. South Korea, on the other hand, was 2% Christian in 1947, and is 30% Christian today. China is on track to have the world’s largest Christian population in a couple of decades.

Indians, for reasons too complicated to speculate upon here, are remarkably loyal to the faith into which they were born. I look forward to reading how the reconverted fare in the coming days. I hope their homecoming is better than the equivalent of, “We really missed you, brother. There was nobody to clean toilets while you were gone.' Meanwhile, I’m enjoying the sight of the daily outrage machine, which the BJP manipulated so well while in opposition, now turned against it in Parliament.