India’s Anti-Conversion Laws Face Supreme Court Challenge

The National Council of Churches in India represents 14 million people—pastors, parishioners, seminarians, and a disproportionate number of Dalits and Adivasis whose ancestors converted generations ago. On February 2, 2026, the NCCI asked the Supreme Court of India to do something no petitioner has successfully done in nearly five decades: strike down the legal architecture that governs—critics say criminalizes—religious conversion across twelve Indian states.

The bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi did not dismiss the petition. They issued notices to the Union government and all twelve respondent states—Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Haryana, and Rajasthan—directing replies within four weeks. The case was clubbed with existing petitions and assigned to a three-judge bench. In the careful lexicon of Indian constitutional litigation, this is the judicial equivalent of clearing the runway.

To understand what is at stake, you have to go back to 1977 and a Catholic priest named Stainislaus. In Rev. Stainislaus v. State of Madhya Pradesh, the Supreme Court upheld the validity of two early anti-conversion statutes—Madhya Pradesh’s 1968 law and Odisha’s 1967 act—and made a distinction that has shaped Indian jurisprudence ever since. Article 25 of the Constitution guarantees the freedom to “profess, practise, and propagate” religion, the Court held, but “propagate” means to transmit or spread one’s faith, not to convert another person. The right to propagate, in other words, did not include the right to proselytize.

That 1977 ruling became the doctrinal bedrock on which state after state erected its own anti-conversion legislation. The laws share a common template: they prohibit conversion by “force, fraud, allurement, or undue influence,” require prior notice to district authorities, and impose criminal penalties that have grown steadily harsher over the decades. But the NCCI’s petition argues that the template has metastasized. What began as a narrow regulation of coercive conversion has become, the petitioners contend, a broad-spectrum tool for surveilling and punishing religious minorities—particularly Christians and, more specifically, Dalit and tribal Christians whose faith marks them for double suspicion.

The evidence is not merely legal. According to Christian Solidarity International, 2025 marked the fifth consecutive year of record violence against Christians in India. The pattern is well-documented: anti-conversion laws empower vigilante groups to file complaints against pastors, church gatherings, and prayer meetings, triggering arrests often without evidence of coercion. The European Centre for Law and Justice, in a March 2025 report submitted to the UN, found that states with anti-conversion legislation record higher rates of anti-minority violence than those without—a correlation the NCCI’s lawyers cited in their petition.

Rajasthan’s 2025 law, the most recent addition to the roster, illustrates the trend toward severity. As Open Doors UK reported, it introduced multi-year minimum sentences, heavy minimum fines, non-bailable offenses, and potential imprisonment of up to 25 years—or life—for repeat or mass conversion. Christians in Rajasthan reported a surge in attacks following the law’s enactment. The petitioners argue that such provisions do not regulate conversion; they deter it, creating a chilling effect on the constitutional right to freedom of conscience.

Senior advocate Meenakshi Arora, appearing for the NCCI, urged the Court to stay the operation of the impugned laws pending final adjudication—a dramatic ask, given that the Stainislaus precedent has stood for nearly half a century. The Court has not yet granted a stay, but the decision to issue notices and constitute a larger bench suggests it is taking the constitutional questions seriously.

Those questions extend beyond religious freedom. India’s anti-conversion laws sit at the intersection of several fault lines in the constitutional order: the tension between individual liberty and state regulation of social conduct; the fraught relationship between Hinduism’s majoritarian cultural claims and the pluralism enshrined in the Preamble; and the perennial question of whether India’s federalism permits states to restrict fundamental rights more aggressively than the Centre. The Organiser, a publication affiliated with the RSS, framed the NCCI’s petition as an attempt to “dilute” laws protecting Hindus from predatory missionaries—a characterization that reveals how deeply the conversion debate is embedded in the country’s culture wars.

What the Supreme Court decides—or declines to decide—will reverberate well beyond church pews and courtrooms. If the bench revisits Stainislaus and finds that the post-1977 proliferation of anti-conversion statutes has crossed a constitutional threshold, it would mark a rare judicial intervention into the majoritarian legislative project of the past decade. If it upholds the laws, it will ratify a legal regime that human rights organizations have repeatedly flagged as enabling persecution. And if it kicks the can issuing narrow procedural rulings that avoid the constitutional merits, it will leave millions of Indian citizens in a legal twilight where their faith is technically protected but practically suspect.

For the NCCI’s 14 million constituents, many of whom live in states where a prayer meeting can trigger a police complaint, the case is not an abstraction. It is a question of whether the Constitution’s promise of religious freedom means what it says or only what the majority permits it to mean.