The Tamil Nadu government told the Supreme Court that here is nothing illegal in the act of missionaries spreading Christianity. The TN govt has cited Article 25 of the Indian Constitution and has said that it guarantees the right to propagate one’s religion to every citizen. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK)-led government argued before the country’s highest court that “anti-conversion laws are prone to misuse against minorities” and that it would not be appropriate for the government to place restrictions on citizens’ personal beliefs and privacy.
The Tamil Nadu government opposed the requests made by PIL petitioner-advocate Ashwini Upadhyay to order a CBI investigation into the alleged cases of forcible conversions and direct the Law Commission of India to prepare a draft on anti-conversion law, remaining adamant that no incident of forceful conversion has been reported in the southern state in the last many years.
The state accepted the legal proposition that the Constitution does not give a fundamental right to any person to turn another man into one’s own religion. “But it gives a right to any person to propagate his religion. Likewise, the Constitution does not prevent any person from getting converted to the religion of his choice. The citizens of the country should be allowed freely to choose their religion and it would not be appropriate for the Government to put spokes to their personal belief and privacy,” read the affidavit.
The MK Stalin-led administration claimed that the Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Forcible Conversion of Religion Act, passed by the state in 2002, was repealed in 2006 “due to popular opposition” to such laws. The late chief minister J Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK government passed a law in 2002 prohibiting forced or coerced conversion to a different religion, but it was later overturned due to strong opposition. In the affidavit, the state has also denied Upadhyay’s claims regarding suicide of minor girl Lavanya in Tamil Nadu after she was allegedly forced to convert by the Christian institution where she was studying.
The state requested the dismissal of Upadhyay’s PIL on the grounds that the petitioner is a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and has tried to turn the legal dispute into a political one.
