Allahabad HC Orders Production of Shamli Man 'Detained' by Father Over Conversion to Islam

The Law Written to Stop Coercion, Used to Detain the Convert Article 25

gives every person the freedom to profess, practice and propagate their own religion. The UP Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021 was written, on its face, to protect that freedom from being taken away by force or fraud.

In the Ayush Malik case, the same law appears to have produced the opposite outcome - an adult man's own father used it to jail his wife's family and allegedly detained his own son to prevent the marriage from standing.

What the Law Actually Does

• And Doesn't Do The 2021 Act criminalises conversion achieved through misrepresentation, force, undue influence, coercion, allurement or marriage and - critically - shifts the burden of proof onto the accused to establish the conversion was voluntary. That reversed burden is the load-bearing mechanism here: it lets a family member's FIR alone trigger arrest and jail time for the other party, before any court has tested whether coercion actually occurred. In this case, Ayush's own public statement - that he had been drawn to Islam since childhood, well before he met Chandni Qureshi - went unheard by the process that jailed her family, because the Act's design front-loads prosecution ahead of judicial scrutiny of consent.

The Constitutional Line the High Court Is Actually Drawing This is

where Article 21's protection of personal liberty does the real work. The Supreme Court settled the underlying question in Shafin Jahan v. Asokan K.M.

• the 2018 Hadiya case - holding that an adult's right to choose their faith and life partner is integral to Article 21 and cannot be overridden by family objection or state interference. The Allahabad High Court's habeas corpus order is not creating new law; it is applying Hadiya directly to a fact pattern the anti-conversion statute was never supposed to enable - a father allegedly using state machinery to detain his own adult son, not to protect him from coercion, but to reverse a choice he'd already made. For the exam, the sharper insight is this: the Act's constitutional vulnerability isn't in its stated purpose - preventing coercive conversion is a legitimate state interest - it is in a burden-of-proof structure that lets private family conflict masquerade as coercion long enough to jail the "wrong" party first and ask whether it was actually voluntary later.