For the past one year, 22-year-old Somanna* (name changed) has had to make an appearance in court twice or thrice a month. A resident of Karnataka’s Haveri district, his ordeal began in February last year when a group of people barged into his house and accused him of “converting people to Christianity by using allurements”. A complaint was filed against him at the Adur police station. But according to Somanna, a Dalit man, what really happened that day was a caste crime, which his attackers allegedly covered up by foisting a case on him under the anti-conversion law. 

Somanna is one of many people in the state who say they have been falsely accused of converting people through allurements and jailed under Karnataka’s anti-conversion law, disingenuously named the Karnataka Protection of Right to Freedom of Religion Act. The law defines the term allurement as “offer of temptation” such as gifts, promise of marriage, employment, praising one religion vis-a-vis another, better lifestyle, etc., leaving it open to misinterpretation and abuse.

The BJP government passed the law in the Legislative Assembly in December 2021, but could not get it passed in the Legislative Council where it did not have a majority. It then issued an ordinance on May 17, 2022, which was replaced by an act four months later on September 30.

The ruling Congress government appears to have forgotten its promise to repeal the law. Following the second Cabinet meeting in June 2023 after the Congress came to power, the government said it would repeal the law. However, a few weeks later, officials said the bill to repeal the law would not be tabled during the Budget Session of the Assembly as Lok Sabha elections were around the corner.

A Minister told TNM that the decision to repeal the law had been buried by “institutional memory loss” — effectively forgotten by both the government and bureaucracy.

Between May 2022 and June 30, 2024, 30 cases were registered and more than 34 people arrested under the anti-conversion law, according to information provided by the Karnataka State Crime Records Bureau in response to an RTI request filed by TNM.

Of these, 21 cases were filed during the BJP government’s tenure and 9 were filed after the Congress government came to power in May 2023. 

Conversations with some of the people who have been booked for attempting conversions through allurements as well as with advocates and the police suggest that the law is largely being used as a tool of harassment and in some cases, to settle personal scores.

A caste crime covered up?

Around two months before the FIR against him, Somanna had moved into a rented house in Balambida, a village of about 2,000 houses, in Haveri district, to serve as part of the Friends Missionary Prayer Band, an independent Chennai-based ministry that organises prayers.

On Sundays, he would conduct half-hour prayer meetings, which included singing a song after which people would pray individually. “There were many people who prayed to Christ, but Jains and Brahmins too joined in.”

During the rest of the week, Somanna would help around a dozen children studying in Classes 5-8 with their homework and teach them Kannada for a fee of Rs 100 which he waived if the parents couldn’t afford it.

“After the children completed their homework, I would tell them a short moral story about respecting parents or about how we should not harm others, and then finish up with a game,” he said. The children belonged to different castes, including the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Jains, and Muslims.

Slowly, the dominant caste villagers began to get suspicious of his caste. Somanna had a friend in the village who was a Dalit. “In Balambida, dominant caste people talk to Dalits if they meet them on the street, but they don’t go to each other’s houses. That’s why they suspected my caste,” Somanna said.

The confusion over Somanna’s caste occurred because the house he had rented belonged to a Muslim and was near the dominant caste houses.

Once they realised he was Dalit, the dominant caste villagers barged into his house and demanded to know how he dared to teach their children. “They said they had a lot of educated people in their castes and how dare I teach their children. They had a problem with Dalit people coming to their area, they abused me with caste slurs and slapped me around when I questioned them. They used the Sunday prayers as an excuse to hide what they did and file a case on me,” Somanna told TNM.

Somanna spent a week in the Haveri district sub-jail. When he got out, his friends advised him to stay away from Balambida. He went back to the police station with friends to file a complaint of casteist abuse, but the police turned him away twice. They only registered a complaint when he was accompanied by a lawyer and others.

“The dominant caste people are very angry with me. If I go back there, I think they will do something to me. How can I work like this? I have to keep going to court all the time,” Somanna said. He now lives at a church in the neighbouring Gadag district and travels to the courts in Haveri.

Against the agency of women

The first case registered under the anti-conversion law in the state was in Bengaluru on October 13, 2022.

A woman named Gayathri (name changed) filed a complaint with the Yeshwanthpura police station on October 6 saying that her daughter Suchitra (name changed) had gone missing the previous day. Two days later, Gayathri said her neighbour Suhail (name changed) brought Suchitra to the police station. When she asked her daughter what happened, she learnt that Suhail had told Suchitra that he would marry her if she converted to Islam. According to the complaint, he had taken her to a dargah in Penukonda in Andhra Pradesh where she was allegedly converted to Islam but he had not married her.

A chargesheet has been filed in the case but according to police sources, Suchitra, who was an adult when the complaint was filed, has denied her mother’s claims.

“She gave a statement before the magistrate saying that she loves Suhail and that she was not kidnapped. She herself ran around to get him bail,” a police officer told TNM.

Asked how a chargesheet was filed when the victim herself had denied her mother’s allegations, the police officer expressed helplessness. “Yes, we know it will not hold up in court, but we have filed the chargesheet.”

When your own people turn against you

Forty-nine-year-old Ganga (name changed), a Lambani woman living in Uppaladinni tanda in Basavan Bagewadi, Vijayapura district, was fired from her job as an ASHA worker after other tanda residents accused her of attempting to convert people. Lambanis are classified as Scheduled Castes in Karnataka, and their villages are called tandas. The Sangh has extensive influence among the Lambani community in the state. 

When TNM spoke to Ganga, she said the FIR followed months of harassment from people of her own tanda. She said they even cut off the electricity and water connections to her house, following which she filed a complaint with the police.

In January, things took a turn for the worse. The whole village turned up at her house, threatened her and assaulted her husband. They demanded that she stop praying to Jesus or leave the village if she wanted to continue doing so.

The FIR against her at Basavan Bagewadi police station on January 13 accused her of attempting to convert through allurements a pregnant woman whom she visited once a week. The village residents then filed a complaint with the local health authorities who removed her from work on May 30. Ganga filed a petition in the Karnataka High Court regarding her termination, and on August 2, the HC issued an order directing her reinstatement. Even after that, tanda residents have objected to her discharging her duties and continue to harass her now and then.

Additionally, she has to keep going to court. In October, she had to appear in court four times, and each trip costs her around Rs 500 – she has to cough up Rs 200 to hire an autorickshaw to get there and back, and the lawyers’ fees.

Settling scores

Bengaluru resident Kamakshi (name changed) was booked on December 15, 2023 for allegedly attempting to convert her neighbour through allurements. “We’ve barely spoken to them in all these years. They go to work in the morning and come back at night. Where is the question of converting them?” 

She said that her neighbours filed a complaint against her because she had consistently objected to them encroaching on her family’s land.

Kamakshi said that she and her neighbour Kavya (name changed) live on adjoining plots of land in HSR Layout. In 2015, Kavya began construction and a year later, Kamakshi and her husband did too.

She said that from the beginning Kavya had encroached on their land, by building window awnings and the sewage sump on their land. Despite repeated requests, the structures were not removed. Kamakshi then complained to the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, which ordered Kavya to remove the encroachment, but the neighbours ignored it.

“My neighbours filed a complaint about conversion against me because of this. Because they know that I am Christian by faith, they’re manipulating the situation and using this law as a tool to get back at us,” Kamakshi said.

Instigating trouble

On November 10, 2022, a man named Abhishek Gowda filed a complaint with the KM Doddi police station in Mandya district claiming that five people stopped him when he was on his way to KM Doddi via Annur on his two-wheeler. He claimed that they gave him pamphlets and tried to “convert” him through allurements. They allegedly abused Hindu gods, told him to become a Christian, and said that he would be looked after, Abhishek said in his complaint.

The FIR in the case is similar to several other FIRs, reading almost like a template, essentially alleging that the accused abused Hindu gods. Typically, they contain mentions that such and such god did such and such a thing, and therefore that god was not worth praying to, and that praying to Jesus was better.

Twenty-nine-year-old Sushant (name changed), a CCTV technician who runs his own business and is one of the accused in the case, told TNM, “We were distributing pamphlets that created awareness about drug abuse outside Bharathi College. We went before college started so that we could reach out to students. Someone came up to us and started asking what we were doing. We explained, but they were not willing to listen. We don’t even know the person who filed a complaint against us.”

The police turned up and took them to the KM Doddi police station. Soon, around 100 people gathered outside the police station. “Many of them were wearing saffron shawls, they raised Jai Shri Ram slogans. The police realised that it was getting serious and they kept us inside the police station,” Sushant said.

The five were booked for attempting to convert and spent 23 days in Mandya prison before they could get bail.

A specious narrative

After Independence, the Constituent Assembly created to frame the Constitution saw heated debates on the freedom of religion. The Drafting Committee came up with Article 25 which guaranteed that “all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right to freely profess, practise and propagate their religion”, only subject to public order, morality, and health.

During the Constituent Assembly debates, the major part of the discussion centred on the right to propagate religion, notes a 2021 PUCL report called Criminalising the Practice of Faith. At the time, several lawmakers strongly objected to the right to propagate religion with Lokanath Misra calling it a “charter for Hindu enslavement”.

Others, such as KT Shah, argued for the “right of freedom of propaganda”, saying that he had “no quarrel with the right that anybody professing any particular form of belief should be at liberty… to place the benefits or beauties of his particular form of worship before others”. However, he cautioned against the exercise of “undue influence” by people in a position of trust, such as doctors, teachers or preachers, and nurses, the PUCL report said.

Several lawmakers including Pandit Lakshmi Kanta Maitra and TT Krishnamachari, both referenced the social and educational activities of Christian-run institutions and made a case for the right of people of all faiths to propagate their faith. Krishnamachari went on to talk about his own life. He said he had studied in a Christian-run institution for 14 years and no attempt had been made to convert him.

But it was in 1967 that the country’s first anti-conversion law – again, disingenuously called a “freedom of religion” act – was passed by the Odisha government, prohibiting conversion by “force, fraud and inducement”. This set the stage for other states to pass such laws with similar definitions.

“Article 25 of our Constitution gives people the right to profess, practise, and propagate their religion. A consequence of propagation is conversion,” said Manavi Atri, advocate and PUCL member.

But Section 3 of Karnataka’s anti-conversion law prohibits conversion by use of misrepresentation, force, undue influence, coercion, allurement or any fraudulent means, or by promise of marriage.

The language of the law and the Hindutva narrative around religious conversion seem to suggest that someone’s beliefs can be changed by another as if with a remote, Manavi noted.

“People decide within their own mind and heart what religion and what faith they want to practise and believe in. When you’re born, you’re born into a religion but after that, your journey into another religion is your own. When the state does not restrict your being born into one religion, then how can it restrict your journey into a faith of your choice? It’s your conversation with your own conscience. The state has no business in that conversation you have with your own conscience. But this law makes it impossible for anyone to convert because it is so vague,” Manavi said.

Pastor Krishna, who founded the Ebenezer Gospel International Ministries in Darenayakanapalya village in Chikkaballapura district, said that any act can be misrepresented as “allurement” legally.

“Say I believe in Jesus and I talk to my wife about it, her brother can file a complaint against me for attempted conversion. Or, I offer a pen to someone at a bank and it has an image of Jesus on it. Even that can be seen as an attempt to convert someone,” the 34-year-old pastor said. He said his grandparents began believing in Jesus. He got himself baptised at the age of 21 and goes by the name Lucas, even though his official records still carry the name his parents gave him. 

Manavi said that in the face of relentless right-wing propaganda about ‘love jihad’ and ‘Christian missionaries’, the vagueness of the term ‘allurement’ creates suspicion about even charitable acts carried out by minorities and legitimises attacks on them. 

“Even welfare measures that minority communities take up in the interest of all communities are painted as being done with the corrupt intention of inducing people to convert to their religion. This has no basis in fact. It creates fear and legitimises the argument that anybody can be induced into marriage or conversion. This is a way of attacking anybody who wants to do rights-based work, especially minority-run institutions,” Manavi said, adding that similar activities carried out by Hindu religious institutions don’t attract the same suspicion.

She said the idea of a law against “forced conversions” is specious. Such a law is unnecessary because any act carried out by fraud or coercion was already illegal under the Indian Penal Code. “Whether you coerce someone into selling property, or changing their religion, it’s already illegal.”

Bengaluru-based activist Shivasundar said that religion is a matter of personal liberty. “The state should not intervene in this, and if it does, it is a transgression of an individual’s fundamental right to religion provided by the Constitution.”

Equally importantly, Shivasundar noted, “We must ask ourselves what our notion of nation is. Built into the idea of this law is the notion that India must be a majoritarian Hindu Rashtra, like the Zionist vision of Israel. Such an idea is against the idea of a secular republic. We are a secular country where all religions coexist, but the Sangh wants to turn it into a Savarkarite Hindu Rashtra.”

In Vinayak Savarkar’s worldview, a Hindu was one whose pitrubhoomi (ancestral land) and punyabhoomi (land of one’s religion) were in India, and who therefore had the first claim to it.

Both Manavi and Shivasundar pointed out that in terms of personal liberty, the law restricts women’s right to choose their life partners. They also observed that the law grants harsher punishment in cases of conversion through allurements of people from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and women.

“This is a patriarchal and casteist notion that women and people from certain communities are naive and incapable of making their own decisions,” Manavi said, while Shivasundar called the provision a “Brahminical idea that is an insult to the dignity of Dalits and women who get converted.”

A change of heart

All the people who had cases filed against them who spoke to TNM had one thing in common: they were going through a time of personal crisis and stumbled upon Jesus, found peace of mind, and so stuck to their belief that the god they prayed to would look after them.

Raised in Lambani customs and beliefs, Ganga became a firm believer of Jesus around September 2023 after her husband met with an accident. Doctors told her his chances of survival were slim.

“Without my husband I would be left alone to raise three children. I had prayed to all the gods I knew. I broke so many coconuts, offered so many harakes. Nothing had any effect,” she told TNM. A harake is a prayer that promises an offering to the deity if the wish is granted.

She then happened to meet an elderly woman who told her to try praying to Jesus. “I just wanted to save my husband. So I prayed to Jesus. Two days later, my husband started to get better. After that, I began to feel that god (Jesus) listens to us when we are in trouble, that he will protect our souls,” Ganga said.

Ganga said that she has since continued to pray to Jesus and her family is doing well. “We pray to Jesus for our own peace of mind, but people don’t let us be. This harassment is painful,” she said.

Sushant was born into a Protestant Christian family, but never prayed or believed in Jesus until there came a point in his life when he too sought a way out. “I had a lot of bad habits when I was in college. I smoked, I drank, and I had a lot of health issues too. One day, a man came to our house to hold prayers. It felt good. It was healing. Now, I feel that there is a voice in my head telling me to do what is right and to behave well with others.”

Hailing from Anandapura village in Chikkaballapura, Somanna’s mother is an agricultural worker while his father works as a watchman. Around five years ago, he was very sick and required surgery. His mother was a believer in Jesus and Somanna believes he recovered because of her prayers. “After I got well, I too started praying to Jesus. I gave up my bad habits. Now, he’s my favourite.”

Dr Ambedkar is another inspirational figure for Somanna. “He belonged to my caste. He was insulted so much. He fought for us, for everyone’s rights, and he wrote the Constitution.”

For both Somanna and Sushant, their belief in their god has motivated them to serve others. Sushant has many friends whom he met through prayer meetings, including the ones who were booked along with him for distributing anti-drug abuse pamphlets. Through the Rhema Prophetic Ministries, he works with HIV positive people and distributes food and other items to homeless people.

Somanna wants to work with children and also continue to work for the church. “I really want to help children, especially our children,” he said referring to children from SC and ST communities. “I want to help them get educated, help them grow.”