Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. The need to keep thrones intact, they say, is the mother of new laws. Herald TV’s weekly debate show exploring the nuances of the proposed move to prepare grounds for an anti-conversion bill threw up some fundamental and quintessential questions.
The moot point which was the foundation of the debate was whether there is a basis to apprehend forced conversions taking place. Interestingly a day after the debate, i.e. Friday the High Court heard a PIL filed by Advocate Ashwini Upadhyay seeking directions from the Centre and Delhi government to frame laws prohibiting forced religious conversions.
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High Court asks: What IS THE BASIS FOR THE PIL PRAYING FOR A LAW ON FORCED CONVERSIONS
The Bench on Friday, June 3, the day this Insight is being written, very importantly and most significantly asked, “What is the basis for this prayer”? The bench pointed out that the petition does NOT mention any instance of forced religious conversion.
“There is no material in record. No document. No instance. You have given three Supreme Court judgments, the rest is your averment.
The Court made it clear that conversion is a person’s prerogative but if someone is forced to convert it’s a different issue.
If there were forced conversions in Goa, our close-knit society would have known and felt. There is none of that.
Goan society (incidentally the majority community share in the population is far higher than the minority) where is the empirical evidence that the society is under threat of forcible conversions?
As the court said and as Fr Mousinho de Ataide, Professor of Theology at Rachol and Pilar and noted exponent of Canon Law, asked “For a law to be made you need empirical studies. How many conversions have taken place, how many forced (read related report for the full conversation on this point)
The biggest pulse of what society feels, and need comes from the society itself, not from FIRs filed. Is the Goan society with a dominant majority community feeling insecure? Far from it.
In the light of all this, Goans across faiths get their hope and strength from their religious and faithful beliefs and mutual respect for all decisions taken in the name of faith. Can anyone go to, say Sattari, and start influencing people to convert. Or can those wanting to draw people from other faiths, into Hinduism, go to coastal south Goa and attempt it. It won’t happen because people across faults will not allow it.
Is the threat of losing the throne the catalyst for such a law?
The need to keep the throne intact forces such acts, it seems. In the Herald debate Advocate Srinivas Khalap asked, “How come all of a sudden the Chief Minister felt that there was a need for such a law after the election”. And Radharao Gracias said, “These laws are coming because the government has failed to deliver on economics. The BJP has released this failure and wants to polarise further.”
If the motive isn’t clear, it becomes an arm-twisting mechanism as we have seen in other instances. Good well-meaning men have stopped giving lifts in their cars to young women even if they feel like doing a good deed because in some instances the lift taker has ripped her clothes and filed an attempt to rape charges, for a motive. Or instances when false cases of sexual crimes have been filed to settle scores. That doesn’t mean that women on road have not had harrowing experiences when their safety has been threatened. But the instances where the law has been misused have led to the infusion of fear where good motives are offset.
The danger here is that the topic of forced conversions is so subjective that from a small village to the capital, the complainant’s word becomes a strong basis and a ruling political force can use this to fix opponents or dissenting voices because the police machinery is under them.
The inherent fear expressed was that it is not about the motive of what the law intends to do but the motive of those who are introducing it. Even the proposal of the law should be passed through the litmus test of honest motive which it has not passed yet, or at the very least the honest motive doesn’t seem to be backed by enough data.
If an anti-conversion law is brought into force, there are many learned people of society who feel it will be misused as a political tool, not a legal one like a Damocles’ sword hanging over an opponent.
As the High Court in the Delhi PIL mentioned, it is the petitioner’s “averment” that forced conversions are taking place. But averment is not data, it’s a claim that needs to be substantiated. And outside of courts, society will not believe you if claims are not backed by facts.
That is Goa’s strength. The strength of our society is stronger than any law proposed for the sake of keeping thrones intact and not to reform society.
