INDIA The BJP wants an anti-conversion law in Maharashtra. Card Thank you: “It is unacceptable”

Amit Shah – Home Minister of the Modi government – announced the measure when he presented the election manifesto ahead of the local elections on November 20. Currently, the draconian law used to intimidate Christians is in force in 10 of India’s 36 States and Territories. Archbishop of Mumbai: “No government can enter the sphere of conscience. Changing religion is a human right enshrined in the Constitution.”

Mumbai () – If they win the local elections scheduled for November 20, the Hindu nationalists of the BJP want to adopt the infamous anti-conversion law in Maharashtra, the populous state that includes Mumbai. This was expressly stated on Sunday by one of the party’s most prominent leaders, Federal Government Home Minister Amit Shah, during the presentation of the Party’s election manifesto. In Maharashtra, the BJP is part of the Mahayuti coalition, an expression of the outgoing administration led by Eknath Shinde of the Shiv Sena party, along with Ajit Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party.

“The adoption of a very strict law to prevent conversions” is among the 25 points listed by Amit Shah for the new legislature. It is not difficult to see behind this announcement the BJP’s intention to play the confessional card in the last days of the electoral campaign, and the news was received with dismay by the Christian communities of Maharashtra.

In dialogue with card. Oswald Gracias, archbishop of Mumbai, firmly rejected this hypothesis and defended freedom of religion: “No government can enter into my soul and say to my conscience: ‘You cannot change your religion.’ carried out by the governments of some Indian States even against the Catholic Church does not make sense. Not only because the documents of the Second Vatican Council speak clearly against this practice, but above all because for Christians conversion is fundamentally a transformation of the heart No. “It is a coincidence that the Church imposes a long period of catechumenate to test the sincerity of those who ask for baptism.”

“Freedom of religion and conversion is a human right – insists Card. Thank you – enshrined in our Constitution. No civil authority has the right to enter the sanctuary that is each person’s conscience and say, ‘You cannot change your religion’ or ‘You must worship God in this way.'”

Anti-conversion legislation is currently in force in 10 of the 36 Indian territories. The first to adopt it was Orissa in 1968; Madhya Pradesh (1968) and Arunachal Pradesh (1978) followed. But it was especially with the great rise of the BJP in 2000 that these measures were extended and often even reinforced in Chhattisgarh (2000), Gujarat (2003), Himachal Pradesh (2006), Jharkhand (2017), Uttarakhand (2018), Uttar Pradesh (2020) and Hariyana (2022). An anti-conversion law was also adopted in Karnataka in 2022, but it was abolished in 2023, when the BJP was defeated in local elections. For their part, Hindu nationalists are trying to put it into effect in Rajasthan, where they returned to government at the end of 2023.