Gandhinagar, India - Shackled for nearly three years on a subject close to the heart of Chief Minister Narendra Modi, the state government on Wednesday moved a step ahead in its quest to check religious conversions by attempting to clear some of the legal hurdles coming in the way of the controversial law.
The Cabinet on Wednesday cleared the proposal for an amendment to the Freedom of Religion Act, 2003, which made forced conversion from one religion to another illegal.
The amendment Bill will be placed in the two-day Assembly session, to take place on September 18 and 19. Under fire from human rights groups ever since the Act was passed in the Assembly in March 2003, the government failed to implement the law because of objections raised by the legal department.
Talking to TOI, minister of state for home Amit Shah said, "We now have clarity on what forced conversion means and to whom should it apply."
Under the new provisions, a person need not seek permission to convert in case of conversion from one sect to another of the same religion.
For example, there would be no government intervention in case of conversion from Shia to Sunni or Protestant to Catholic.
More significantly, the same yardstick would apply to conversions between the faiths of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism.
"We consider these religions as one whole,"Shah said. Well-placed Sachivalaya sources added that other amendments include defining certain vague terms like allurement. One of the main planks in the original Act, allurement was found to be untenable by the legal department.
"The amendment Bill tries to redefine the term in order to make it legally sound and enforceable, so that it cannot be challenged in higher courts,"informed an official.
Said a senior bureaucrat, "We have also decided to fix the date from which forced conversions will become illegal in Gujarat."
Though passed in 2003, the government could not frame rules required for its implementation. The rules should have been published in the official gazette.
However, this never happened because the state government was unsure of whether or not the Act would withstand legal scrutiny.