If the Goa government enacts a law to prevent conversions –but not forced conversions it will be unconstitutional. This is simply because Article 25 of the Constitution guarantees all persons living in India the right to freely practise, profess and propagate any religion of their choice, according to a recent Delhi High Court judgment. This would axiomatically include rationalists who deny the existence of God such as the renowned physicist Steven Hawking or the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.
Only the three grounds of public health, public order and morality curtail the right to profess and propagate a religion as per the Constitution’s mandate. Though the Indian Penal Code was enacted in 1860, it has adequate provisions to jail those who convert others by force or fraud. If the Goa government uses the stray case of one pastor to justify enacting such an anti-conversion law, it is deliberately misleading Goans through propaganda.
Every political party has the right to propagate their own ideology which is covered under Article 25 which is why some of these political parties repeat a lie a million times to give it the semblance of the truth. The truth is that in 1510 when Afonso de Albuquerque defeated Adil Shah to march into what we today call as Old Goa, the concept of a republic and a democracy was relatively unknown. What was known was the people had to profess the same religion as their King or Emperor to ensure there was no disharmony between the King and his subjects. The Inquisition was set up in Goa and other regions of the Catholic world to prevent recidivists from relapsing to their own cultures and religions.
This was why the Portuguese adventurers were charged with converting the so-called heathen to save their souls from damnation which was the medieval concept of Christianity as understood by Jesus Christ’s exhortation to his disciples to spread his teachings. The concepts of liberty, equality and fraternity was created about 250 years later during the French Revolution when the clergy, the nobility and the King and Queen were guillotined to ensure Napoleon Bonaparte supplanted a suppliant clergy and an effete monarchy with oligarchy.
But those concepts have evaporated with the aeons so that today, we have theologians like Richard Rohr who has postulated that Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was unnecessary for mankind to be saved so it is possible to approach God through one’s own religion. These are radical departures from traditional Catholic doctrine but the fact that Rohr has neither been banned by the Pope from spreading his ideas nor been excommunicated proves the Catholic church moves with the times.
This is why to accuse the Catholic Church of forced conversions today is unforgivable because its theology has been metamorphosed. Undoubtedly, there are hundreds of denominations in Christianity which go about proselytising. But these are aberrations and not the norm with the indisputable fact that no empirical data has been compiled as to how many such Christian or Muslim groups have forcibly converted others to their religion.
The State is larger than the government because the former encompasses all citizens whereas the latter includes only those who have been allegedly elected on grounds of caste or creed to govern us for five years.
The laws they enact reflect the policy of the government-of-the-day which is undoubtedly influenced by religion. The concepts of pitrabhumi (fatherland) and punyabhumi (holy land of our ancestors) which are the twin tests of who is a Hindu were enunciated by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. Failing either the test of pitrabhumi or punyabhumi would entail one is not a Hindu and ipso facto not entitled to be granted citizenship as a right. In fact, we need laws to prevent the land mafia grabbing Goans’ property as reported in oHeraldo.
Laws against love jihad automatically fail the test of balancing the laws enacted by the government against the fundamental rights of citizens because there is no empirical data to justify the passing of such laws.
Moreover, 884,000 citizens from the majority community have renounced Indian citizenship during the last seven years to settle in what we mistakenly call Christian countries because their Constitutions do not explicitly declare them as such. These include several thousand Catholics from Goa who regularly accept Portuguese passports to migrate to the countries.
Conversions whether forced or voluntary take place after marriage when one spouse who is usually the bride, converts to the religion of her husband to avoid friction with her in-laws. This is what communal politicians have alleged is “love jihad,” a crime based on propaganda rather than on empirical data. This was the same thinking of the 1500s when the Portuguese adventurers first conquered and then converted those regions which they captured.
Passing a law through the ordinance route without a debate or discussion is anti-democratic which is why if such a law is passed, the high court of Bombay at Goa will have no choice but to strike it down if the epithet “forced conversions” is not strictly defined in the law.
For democracy is the rule of the majority for the majority because they sometimes want to subjugate their minorities. And religion is the only weapon to do so.
(Olav Albuquerque holds a Ph.D in law and is a senior journalist-cum-advocate of the Bombay High Court.)
