When Protecting Against Coercion Becomes Its Own Coercion

A Law Meant to Stop Coercion Is Producing Its Own There is a

specific, almost paradoxical image at the centre of this story: Christian congregants in Mumbai signing paperwork to certify that they are praying voluntarily. Not because anyone accused them of being coerced - but because the law now on the books makes that accusation dangerously easy to make and dangerously hard to disprove once made.

The state's underlying interest is not manufactured. India's Supreme Court settled, in 1977, that "propagating" religion under Article 25 does not extend to converting others by force or fraud and states have a legitimate public-order basis to legislate against coercive conversion.

That principle is not in dispute here and shouldn't be. What is in dispute is what Maharashtra's specific statute actually does in practice, separate from what it claims to prevent in theory. The law reverses the burden of proof - once accused, a person must prove their innocence rather than the state proving guilt.

It requires advance intimation to the district magistrate before a conversion. And critically, it allows not just the person allegedly being converted, but their parents, siblings and relatives, to file a complaint - meaning a family member who disapproves of someone's religious choice now has a state-backed mechanism to weaponise that disapproval.

Combine that design with a documented pattern of vigilante groups disrupting prayer meetings and police then filing the overwhelming majority of resulting cases against the meeting's organisers rather than the disruptors and the incentive structure becomes clear: gathering to pray, in itself, now carries enough legal risk that congregations are pre-emptively generating their own defence paperwork.

That is what a chilling effect actually looks like - not a law being enforced against wrongdoing, but a law's mere existence altering how ordinary people exercise a right they are not actually breaking. Nobody in this story is accused of coercing anyone.

The self-declarations exist precisely because the law makes lawful religious practice indistinguishable, on paper, from the offence it claims to target - and puts the burden on the individual to prove the difference after the fact, rather than on the state to establish it before intervening.

None of this requires abandoning the state's legitimate interest in preventing coercive conversion. It requires acknowledging that a statute can serve a real purpose in its stated intent while functioning, in its actual operation, as something closer to surveillance of a minority community's ordinary religious life.

The test for whether an anti-conversion law is doing its job is not whether it exists, but whether the people it is not meant to target can still practice their faith without first proving, in writing, that they are innocent of a crime no one has actually accused them of.