The ifs and buts of constitutionalising conversion
Article 25 of the Constitution of India guarantees every citizen the freedom to profess, practice and propagate religion. Though presented as a neutral liberal guarantee, it rests on a foundational error: it assumes equivalence among religions that are doctrinally and structurally dissimilar. In particular, it ignores the distinction between proselytising religions—most prominently Christianity and Islam—and the non-proselytising indigenous religions such as Hindutva (Sanatana Dharma). By equating unlike religions, the Constitution creates not neutrality but a deeply asymmetric legal order.
The analogy is unavoidable: it accords equal freedom to predator and prey.
Proselytising religions are, by theological design, expansionist and exclusivist, mandated to convert and displace other faiths. In contrast, Hindutva is non-proselytising, pluralistic, and civilisational rather than expansionist; it is not organised around conversion unlike Christianity and Islam. Granting both an identical right to propagate is therefore not neutrality but an abdication of constitutional realism, rooted in a prior failure of theological realism. Instead of protecting non-proselytising religions, Article 25 licences proselytising religions to target them through organised conversion activity.
Article 25 thus disregards an intelligible differentia between proselytising and non-proselytising religions, treating unequal systems as equal and thereby producing structural inequality with long-term adverse civilisational consequences.
This constitutional design, crafted at the behest of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel as Chairman of the Committee on Fundamental Rights, Minorities, etc., transforms religious freedom into a constitutional license for organised and institutionalised conversion. What ought to have been an individual liberty now functions as a constitutional sanction for sustained religious aggression against Hindus. Conversion is rarely an isolated act of conscience; it is typically the outcome of coordinated campaigns backed by organisational networks, foreign funding, and targeted outreach, including systematic church-planting and organised da‘wah networks. These campaigns employ inducements, social pressure, threats of divine displeasure, and sustained narratives that vilify indigenous religions. The result is not merely individual religious change, but systematic alteration of the civilisational landscape.
The Indian State recognised this phenomenon early on. The Christian Missionary Activities Enquiry Committee, under Justice M B Niyogi (1956), documented the organised and resource-backed nature of aggressive missionary activity, including the use of material inducements, institutional penetration through education and healthcare, and the creation of dependency structures—where access to essential services, employment, education, or social support becomes contingent, implicitly or explicitly, on religious conversion. It recommended constitutional amendment and legislative intervention to curb organised conversions. These recommendations were ignored, leaving the structural problem intact.
State-level anti-conversion legislation—beginning with the Odisha Freedom of Religion Act (1967) and the Madhya Pradesh Dharma Swatantrya Adhiniyam (1968), followed by analogous laws in other states—sought to prohibit conversion by force, fraud, and inducement. These measures have failed. Their defect is structural: they address the modalities of conversion while leaving untouched its institutional engine. More importantly, they operate within a constitutional framework that protects propagation, thereby neutralising enforcement. The result is a contradiction: the law seeks to prohibit what the Constitution expressly guarantees.
This contradiction extends beyond domestic enforcement. These toothless and unenforceable laws have been weaponised in international discourse: church organisations cite them as evidence of religious repression, thereby mobilising external pressure and financial support to intensify conversion activity. The result is not merely a regulatory failure but a structural feedback loop—where constitutionally constrained State action is delegitimised globally, while the resulting asymmetry and its adverse consequences are borne by the Hindu society.
The consequences of this asymmetry are civilisational. India is the sole historical homeland of Hindu civilisation, and Hindus are unique among major traditions in having no nation-state anywhere in the world. Christianity and Islam, by contrast, are represented across more than 150 Christian-majority and over 50 Islamic countries. Hindu civilisation thus occupies an anomalous position: territorially concentrated, demographically exposed, and politically unanchored. Its continuity therefore depends on preserving a stable Hindu majority. This vulnerability is reflected in demographic trends. Since Independence, the Hindu share of the population has declined —from 84.68 per cent in 1951 to 79.80 per cent in the 2011 Census, with a further decline to 78.06 per cent by 2015 (Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister). Adjusted for enumeration distortions, the effective share is plausibly little over 60 per cent by 2025. These distortions include crypto-Christians; atheists, communists, Ambedkarites, and others with Hindu names, who explicitly reject Hindu religious identity yet are counted as Hindus; as well as unaccounted illegal Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh and Rohingya populations from Myanmar.
Such contraction in the relative share of the Hindu population cannot be explained by ordinary demographic variation alone. Indeed, a decline of this scale, particularly the rapid erosion in recent decades, is rare for a majority community in a large and otherwise stable nation-state during peacetime.
In civilisational terms, survival depends not merely on absolute numbers but on relative share, institutional density, and continuity of transmission across generations. The ongoing Hindu demographic contraction is not a routine statistical fluctuation but a structural development with long-term civilisational implications.
History in the Indian subcontinent provides a stark illustration of this process. The Partition was preceded by the near-total erosion of Hindu civilisational presence in large regions that became Pakistan and Bangladesh. Post-independence developments in Kashmir, the Northeast, and over 200 districts across the country show similar patterns of transformation, albeit through different mechanisms. These are not isolated but manifestations of a broader dynamic in which sustained, engineered demographic change leads to civilisational displacement.
Comparative constitutional practice highlights the anomaly of India’s position. The Constitution of Greece explicitly prohibits proselytisation. All Islamic countries ban conversion out of Islam. China tightly regulates religious activity, including missionary work. India alone, as a civilisational state, constitutionally protects propagation despite its demonstrably asymmetrical consequences. This is not principled liberalism but civilisational betrayal.
The issue is not whether religious freedom should exist, but how it is defined. Freedom of conscience—the right to believe, disbelieve, or change belief—is an individual liberty. Organised propagation aimed at conversion is an external, strategic activity, not an internal liberty.
No fundamental right is without limits. The Constitution itself recognises that freedoms are subject to reasonable restrictions in the interests of public order, morality, and other collective interests. Civilisational continuity in a country such as India is not an abstract concern but a foundational condition for its continued existence. A State that cannot preserve the civilisational matrix from which it derives legitimacy risks undermining its own long-term stability. Bereft of its Hindu foundation, India would become merely a geographical extension of Pakistan.
The remedy is clear. Article 25 must be amended to delete the word ‘propagate’ and to expressly prohibit religious propagation and conversion activities. This is not a curtailment of religious freedom but a restoration of its proper scope. The present framework converts freedom into a constitutional license for organised conversion activity against Hindus. Removing this asymmetry would align constitutional design with civilisational reality and ensure that individual liberty does not become an instrument of collective erosion. Without such correction, the current trajectory risks profound and potentially irreversible consequences for India’s civilisational identity.
(The writer is a retired IPS officer and former Director of CBI. Views are personal)
