The Bharatiya Janata Party government in Rajasthan on Tuesday passed a bill to prevent religious conversions, introducing stringent penalties such as life imprisonment and fines of up to Rs 1 crore for force, fraud, allurement or coercion, The Hindu reported.

The 2025 Rajasthan Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Bill was passed in the Assembly amid Opposition Congress MLAs boycotting the debate and walking out. The party alleged that the new legislation would break communal harmony.

Speaking in the Assembly, Minister of State for Home Jawahar Singh Bedham said that the passage of the bill would pave the way for maintaining “peace and harmony” in society.

“Our Sanatana Dharma has always been liberal, which is reflected by Article 25 of the Constitution… but it does not support religious conversion through fraud, fear and deception,” The Hindu quoted Bedham as saying.

Sanatana Dharma is a term some use as a synonym for Hinduism.

Article 25 guarantees the fundamental right to freedom of religion.

The bill also contains provisions for confiscating and demolishing properties where “mass conversions” take place.

Under the bill, offences will be cognisable, non-bailable and triable by a sessions court. It also states that marriages undertaken solely for conversion will be declared void by the court, and conversions carried out before or after such marriages will be considered unlawful.

Additionally, those returning to their “ancestral religion” have been exempted from it, The Hindu reported.

Earlier this month, state Law Minister Jogaram Patel had said that a previous version of the bill, introduced in February, would be recalled. “The new bill has harsher punishments than the outgoing one to prevent the menace of conversion,” Patel had said.

Once the bill takes effect, Rajasthan will become the 12th state to have an anti-conversion law. The states that currently have such laws are Odisha, Arunachal Pradesh, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Jharkhand, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.

Critics have said that such laws are used to target religious minorities and inter-faith couples.