Abstract
In discussions about religious freedom in India, the country’s conflict regarding conversion plays a central role. The Constitution’s freedom of religion clause, Article 25, grants the right “freely to profess, practise and propagate religion,” but this has generated a dispute about the meaning of the right ‘to propagate’ and its relation to the freedom to convert. The recognition of this right is said to be the result of a key debate in the Constituent Assembly of India. To find out which ideas and arguments gave shape to this debate and the resulting religious freedom clause, we turn to the Assembly’s deliberations and come to a surprising conclusion: indeed, there was disagreement about conversion among the Assembly members, but this never took the form of a debate. Instead, there was a disconnect between the member’s concerns, objections, and comments concerning the draft article on the one hand, and the Assembly’s decision about the religious freedom clause on the other. If a key ‘debate’ took this form, what then could the ongoing dispute concerning conversion in India be about? We first examine some recent historiographical accounts of the Indian conflicts about conversion and proselytization. Then we develop a hypothesis that aims to make sense of this enduring conflict by identifying a blindness at its core: people reasoning against the background of Indian traditions see ‘propagation of religion’ as the human dissemination of tradition; this is incompatible with a religious conception where conversion and propagation of faith are seen in terms of God’s intervention. These two ways of seeing ‘propagation’ generate two conflicting experiences of the Indian dispute about religious freedom and conversion.
Highlights
The issue of religious conversion complicates any discussion about the right to freedom of religion in post-Independence India
What the historiographical accounts have in common is that they focus on the decades preceding the Indian Independence of 1947 to explain the disputes that occurred in the Constituent Assembly and afterwards, that is, they connect the controversies about conversion and propagation of religion in post-Independence India to a set of historically specific concerns and discourses which emerged from the events and developments of the late colonial period
It provides them with a common vocabulary; it plays a central role in formulating thoughts about human traditions, and in assessing the plausibility, significance, and reasonableness of such thoughts. This conception of tradition and the related cluster of ideas determine the way in which followers of Indian traditions categorize and see the practices of other communities. Another phenomenon of vital importance is one which we will not consider in any depth here, but which we have examined elsewhere: these widely shared clusters of background ideas concerning tradition gave shape to how Indians adopted the English language from the colonial period onwards and how they use its relevant vocabulary such as ‘religion’, ‘conversion’, ‘propagation’, ‘freedom’, and the ‘right to religious freedom’ (Claerhout 2014; De Roover et al 2011)
Summary
Several Indian states passed bills banning the use of force, fraud, and allurement in conversion, called ‘Freedom of Religion Acts’. This type of legislation has led to concerns about religious intolerance and discrimination against Christian and Muslim minorities: the legal restrictions on conversion are said to threaten the right to freedom of conscience and religion (Ahmad 2018; Coleman 2008; Huff 2009; Jenkins 2008). Scholars suggest that the Constituent Assembly, the body that drafted the Indian Constitution between 1946 and 1949, decided to include the right to propagate religion among the fundamental rights of India’s citizens after a key debate, which ended in a victory for the more liberal-minded. We turn to the Assembly’s records to discover what its members had to say about religious freedom, conversion, and the propagation of religion
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