Karnataka’s new law against conversions criminalises key dimensions of what it is to be human—the impulse to charity, the freedom to love and the freedom to choose a faith of one’s choice—in a manner that undermines or freely violates rights afforded to every Indian citizen.



Some of the features of The Karnataka Protection of Right to Freedom of Religion Ordinance, 2022, promulgated—in an extraordinary move supposedly reserved only for emergencies—by the governor of Karnataka are:



–It criminalises marriage for love and acts of charity, including running schools, hospitals or vocational centres merely on allegations of conversion by relatives or colleagues.


– It only allows a citizen to change religion after threading a maze of bureaucratic and police procedures, before and after conversion.



– It goes against a fundamental tenet of criminal law, reversing the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused, with offences non-bailable and jail terms up to 10 years.



The ordinance has now become law and will remain so until a bill of the same name cleared by the Karnataka assembly in December 2021 is passed in its next session by the legislative council, where the government is one vote short of a majority.



As per the constitutional provision Article 213, which empowers the governor to promulgate an ordinance, the “Governor should be satisfied that circumstances exist which render it necessary for him to take immediate action”.

There is nothing in the public domain that indicates any circumstances necessitating immediate action, apart from vague allegations made by some legislators and ministers of Karnataka's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).


If the ordinance was meant to tackle so called “illegal conversions”, there were no reports of any such conversions that required an ordinance to be promulgated.



The exercise of this power by the government ignores widely documented attacks on churches and places of worship, which were carried out by Hindu extremist groups in Karnataka, most towards the end of 2021 as the government talked up the anti-conversion law, as Article 14 reported.


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