The Supreme Court Already Has the File on Anti-Minority Legislation. Now is the Hour It Should Open It.

On July 31, the Archdiocese of Bombay issued a press note. It records deep concern at the President’s assent to the Maharashtra Freedom of Religion Act, 2026, and it notes what that assent means: Maharashtra is now the 13th state in India with a stringent law policing religious conversion. Here is what the archdiocese objects to: Terms like allurement, undue influence and misrepresentation, if left undefined and elastic, can swallow a village school, a clinic, a hostel. A provision letting a blood relative file a police complaint about an adult’s change of faith without that adult’s knowledge or consent. Powers permitting police to act on their own initiative before any affected person has complained of anything. A reversed burden of proof paired with non-bailable offences. Declaration procedures that expose a couple to public scrutiny for the crime of marrying across a line someone else drew for them. The archdiocese was scrupulous about one point, and so am I. The Catholic Church has always condemned conversion by force, fraud, coercion or inducement. No person of faith can defend such practices. The objection is not to the stated purpose of these laws. It is to what happens after they are passed. Whatever spin the government now applies, the pattern is no longer arguable. This new generation of statutes appears in one kind of state and not another. It is drafted loosely, enforced selectively, and used against Christians, against Muslims, and against couples whose only offence is the choice of a spouse. Ask the plain question. On what authority does a police officer walk into a Sunday service, stop the singing, and inform a congregation of poor villagers that they are under investigation for forced conversion? No complainant. No victim. No evidence. The law now supplies the authority. That is the objection entire. For years I have put one question to every government that passes such a law, and I put it again. Produce the convictions. Not the FIRs. Not the arrests. Not the press conferences. Show me one hundred men and women convicted by a court of forced or fraudulent conversion, after decades of these laws across a dozen states. They cannot. In Uttar Pradesh, by November 2022, some 291 cases had been registered and 507 people arrested under the state Act. Not one of the 507 had been convicted. By mid- 2024 the figures had climbed past 800 cases and 1,600 arrests , and still no case had returned a guilty verdict. In 2025 there were roughly 400 arrests of Christians; about 600 people were released from custody and more than 170 were acquitted by the courts. Thousands of lives disrupted. A conviction rate that rounds to zero. That is not law enforcement. It is punishment by procedure. The arrest, the cell, the lost job, the ruined name, all delivered before a judge has found anything at all. The men who draft these statutes understand this perfectly. It is the design, not a flaw in it. One of our own pastors in Rajasthan spent over four months i