Sign before praying: A new conversion law is affecting churchgoers in Indian state

**Sign before praying: New conversion law is unsettling churchgoers in an Indian state**

A fresh anti-conversion law in Maharashtra has stirred concern among Christians.

Some churches in and around Mumbai, India’s financial hub, have started asking worshippers to sign written declarations saying, “I came here to pray of my own free will.”

Visitors write their names, sometimes include an ID card number, and sign to confirm that no one pressured or lured them into attending church. The forms, which the BBC has seen, have no legal force. Churches are keeping them in case a prayer meeting is questioned and organisers are accused of trying to convert those present.

The practice began at some churches in late August, shortly before a new law against religious conversion came into force in Maharashtra, whose capital is Mumbai.

The law bans conversions carried out through force, fraud, coercion or inducement. It also requires anyone seeking to convert voluntarily to inform the authorities in advance. An illegal conversion can bring a prison term of up to seven years, or up to 10 years for a repeat offence.

Maharashtra’s government says the law is meant to shield people, especially those who are socially or economically vulnerable, from being forced or tricked into changing religion.

Critics, however, argue that its broad wording, harsh punishments and oversight of even voluntary conversions could pull the state and police into one of the most private choices a person can make. The state government did not reply to repeated BBC requests for comment.

Although the law applies to all religions, the unease is being felt most sharply in places where minorities, especially Christians, worship. At the centre of the dispute is a long-standing tension over allegations, usually raised by right-wing groups, that people are being pressured or enticed to change religion in exchange for benefits.

Devdan Tribhuvan has witnessed some of that unease firsthand.

A fourth-generation Christian in Vasai, a suburb of Mumbai, he belongs to an organisation that offers legal help to Christians in and around the city. In recent months, he says, people have increasingly come to him not with court matters, but with stories of disrupted prayer meetings and questions about what they are still allowed to do.

Some have told him about strangers entering churches and questioning those inside: “What is your name? Why are you here? Has anyone offered you something?”

The questions become more direct, Tribhuvan said, when a worshipper has a name that does not sound Christian: “Has anyone forced you to come? Has anyone offered you an inducement?”

Many who reach out to him are not seeking legal action. They want to know whether simply gathering to pray could expose them to an accusation of conversion.

In July, an investigation by The Indian Express

Nine police cases followed — seven against worshippers or prayer organisers, and two against members of the Hindu nationalist group Bajrang Dal. Police did not answer detailed questions about the cases or what action was taken.

“Is gathering for prayer itself conversion?” Tribhuvan asks.

In Mumbai, that question carries special significance. The city has grown by attracting people from across India and beyond, bringing their gods and rituals with them. A church bell can be heard near a mosque’s call to prayer; a shrine of one faith can draw followers of another.

People of many religions visit the Muslim shrine Haji Ali. Hindus light candles at Mount Mary, a Catholic basilica overlooking the city. Crowds pack the streets around Lalbaug during the Hindu festival of Ganesh Chaturthi and visit Siddhivinayak temple throughout the year.

Maharashtra is the latest of more than a dozen states to restrict religious conversion. The laws vary, but their scope has widened in recent years, especially in states governed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. Several are being challenged in the Supreme Court.

Behind that expansion are long-standing claims by Hindu nationalist groups that Christians use money, education or medical care to pull poor and tribal communities away from Hinduism, and that Muslim men pursue Hindu women in order to convert them — an alleged plot they call “love jihad.”

Critics say such accusations have encouraged harassment of Christian prayer meetings and interfaith couples, and that the laws give accusers a way to involve police in matters of prayer, marriage and belief.

Maharashtra’s government says the new law still allows people to convert by choice, while addressing what it says is a rise in forced conversions that existing laws have failed to stop.

Critics question where the law draws the line between force and choice.

“We do not support forceful conversions, if any,” said Samsuddin Tamboli, president of the Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal (Muslim Truth-seeking Society), a reformist organisation. His concern is what the law defines as inducement.

Its definition of “allurement” includes employment, free education at a religious institution, a promise of marriage, a “better lifestyle” and “divine healing”. Even praising one religion over another can fall under it.

“The definition has been kept so vague that almost any benefit accruing to a person can be considered or argued to be an allurement,” said Abhay Thipsay, a retired Bombay High Court judge.

“If a person receives some benefit and consciously chooses to convert for that reason, why should it be considered wrong?”

The law also lets parents, siblings and other relatives complain to police about an allegedly unlawful conversion, forcing the person accused of causing or helping it to prove it was lawful.

Critics say that for interfaith couples, this creates yet another obstacle to marriages that may already face family resistance.

Indian law permits people of different faiths to marry without converting, but requires a month’s notice. Lara Jesani, a lawyer who has helped interfaith couples secure court protection, said details of planned weddings have sometimes reached relatives and Hindu nationalist groups opposed to them during that notice period.

In cases she has handled, she said, families have taken women away, even from the marriage registrar’s office.

Now, she fears the new law may give families or right-wing groups a fresh way to target such couples.

“Even when neither intend to convert, [the couples] fear a relative could accuse one partner of trying to convert the other.”

The Maharashtra government did not answer detailed BBC questions about these concerns. But when the law was passed, state minister Pankaj Bhoyar said it did not violate the right to change religion. The notification requirement, he said, was meant to determine whether a conversion was voluntary, while allowing the state to act against those brought about by fraud, coercion or inducement.

Tribhuvan remains worried, he says, and that anxiety reaches even the small prayer gatherings held closer to home when a church is too far away.

Fifty people might attend, he said, sometimes 100 — and someone who is not Christian might join as well.

“If someone else wishes to come and pray, we cannot stop them,” he said. “That is what we call the right to choose.”

For Thipsay, the retired judge, the precaution raises a broader question.

“If an adult has the power to make major decisions - such as whom to marry - and has been given the right to vote,” he said, “why should they not have the power to make this decision too?”