Karnataka's anti-conversion law weaponised for harassment, false cases, personal vendettas
Bengaluru: A recent report by The News Minute, reveals that Karnataka’s anti-conversion law is being used to harass citizens, often for personal grudges or in the guise of protecting religious sentiments. Numerous individuals, including those from marginalised backgrounds, claim false accusations of religious conversion have been levelled against them, masking caste discrimination or personal vendettas.
One such case is of Somanna (name changed), a Dalit resident of Haveri district. He has been attending court almost monthly for over a year due to a complaint filed against him in February 2023, accusing him of converting people to Christianity. However, he alleges the true issue was caste-based hostility in his village, Balambida, where he had faced discrimination for teaching local children from different castes. The anti-conversion accusation, he claims, was used to disguise casteist abuse after he refused to stop the Sunday prayer meetings he hosted.
Introduced by the BJP in December 2021, Karnataka's anti-conversion law, The Karnataka Protection of Right to Freedom of Religion Act, criminalises conversions allegedly induced through "allurement" or "temptations." Critics, including legal experts, argue that the law’s ambiguous language makes it susceptible to misuse.
Between May 2022 and June 2024, 30 cases under the anti-conversion law have been reported across Karnataka, according to the State Crime Records Bureau. Although the Congress government pledged to repeal the law after assuming power, it later deferred the decision, citing the impending Lok Sabha elections.
Reports show that 21 cases were filed under the BJP-led government, with nine additional cases occurring post the Congress takeover in May 2023. Interviews by ‘The New Minute’, with several of the accused and legal professionals suggest that the law is frequently wielded as a weapon of harassment rather than protection.
In another case from Bengaluru, a complaint was filed in October 2022 against an interfaith couple. The woman’s mother accused her daughter’s partner, Suhail (name changed), of coercing her daughter into conversion. The woman, however, denied these claims and has openly defended her relationship, challenging her mother’s allegations.
Other incidents highlight similar misuse. In Vijayapura district, Ganga (name changed), an ASHA worker, was terminated after community members accused her of attempting conversions. Harassment in her village escalated, with locals even cutting off her water and electricity supply. Despite a favourable High Court order reinstating her, her return to work has been marked by ongoing intimidation.
The misuse of Karnataka's anti-conversion law reflects historical debates on religious freedom, a topic heavily discussed in the Constituent Assembly while framing Article 25. Proponents of the right to propagate cited the freedom to share one’s faith, while others expressed concern about potential abuses of influence. Despite this, the right to propagate remains enshrined in India’s Constitution, though anti-conversion laws, including Karnataka’s, restrict this under claims of “inducement.”
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Oath-taking ceremony of first BJP govt in Bengal on May 9; Modi, Shah likely to attend
Kolkata (PTI): The oath-taking ceremony of the first BJP government in West Bengal will be held at Brigade Parade Ground here on May 9, marking the saffron camp’s arrival in power in a state after decades on the political fringes.
The ceremony, scheduled to begin at 10 am, is expected to witness the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president Nitin Nabin, several Union ministers and chief ministers of BJP- and NDA-ruled states, party sources said.
“The new BJP government will take oath on May 9 at 10 am at Brigade Parade Ground,” state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya announced on Wednesday.
Even as the BJP leadership kept its cards close to the chest on the chief ministerial face, Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari has emerged as a frontrunner in internal discussions after cementing his position as the party’s principal mass leader in Bengal politics.
Adhikari, once among Mamata Banerjee’s closest lieutenants and a key architect of the TMC’s rural expansion in districts such as Purba Medinipur, crossed over to the BJP ahead of the 2021 assembly elections and went on to defeat Banerjee in Nandigram in one of Bengal’s fiercest political battles.
Five years later, he again found himself at the centre of Bengal’s political churn by beating Banerjee in her own turf at Bhabanipur by over 15,000 votes.
Other names for the CM post doing the rounds include Bhattacharya, Union minister Sukanta Majumdar and former Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta, though party insiders indicated that the leadership was inclined towards projecting a “bhumiputra” face rooted in Bengal’s linguistic and cultural ethos.
During the campaign, Shah repeatedly asserted that the BJP’s chief minister in Bengal would be a “son of the soil”, born and educated in the state, in an attempt to blunt the TMC’s sustained attack that the BJP represented an “outsider” political culture alien to Bengal’s social and intellectual traditions.
The BJP bagged 207 of the 294 assembly seats in the recently concluded elections, ending the Trinamool Congress’s uninterrupted 15-year rule and scripting the saffron party’s biggest breakthrough in a state where it once struggled to open its electoral account.
Significantly, the swearing-in ceremony will be held on the 25th day of Baisakh in the Bengali calendar — observed across the state as Rabindra Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore — lending the event a deeper cultural symbolism.
According to BJP leaders, the choice of the date is aimed at embedding the party’s historic rise within Bengal’s cultural imagination and countering the long-standing perception battle over identity and belonging.
Over the last decade, the BJP has steadily attempted to appropriate and reinterpret icons of Bengal’s cultural nationalism — from Tagore and Swami Vivekananda to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Syama Prasad Mookerjee — as part of a broader ideological effort to expand its emotional and political footprint in the state.
Party insiders said the leadership was also conscious of the need to balance Bengal’s competing regional aspirations while choosing the chief ministerial face, with discussions also taking place around whether greater representation should be accorded to north Bengal, a region where the BJP has made substantial electoral gains over successive elections.
A meeting of the newly elected BJP MLAs has been convened on May 8 evening, party sources said, though the leadership remained tight-lipped over the final choice.
The Brigade Parade Ground ceremony is expected to mark not merely a transfer of power, but a defining moment in Bengal’s political history, the culmination of the BJP’s long ideological and organisational march from the margins to the centre of power in a state that had for decades resisted the saffron surge seen elsewhere in India.
