Dear Shri Devendra Fadnavis Ji,

You may be supremely happy that your Freedom of Religion Bill has received the President's assent and has now come into force in Maharashtra. But there is an irony that you may not have noticed.

In Pune, your police were so eager to implement the law that they did not even wait for President Droupadi Murmu's assent before invoking it in two cases. To be fair to the Pune police, they withdrew the provisions once the Home Department made it clear that the law would come into force only on August 28.

Everyone knows who the principal target of your legislation is, even though the law does not name any religion. Christians constitute a tiny fraction of Maharashtra's population. Yet you have persuaded the legislature to enact a law that can only be described as draconian. It is like using a sledgehammer to kill a fly.

The community that apparently frightens your government so much is hardly a threat to public order. Why, then, this disproportionate anxiety about a tiny, largely law-abiding and highly literate community? It does not show your government in a particularly good light.

And if you think you have frightened Christians, you are mistaken. Freedom of Religion laws have existed in some Indian states for nearly six decades. Yet Christianity has neither disappeared nor expanded into the demographic monster that its critics routinely portray it as.

Indeed, the manner in which these laws are being applied should concern every citizen, not merely Christians. In Madhya Pradesh, seven Christians — six of them pastors — were sentenced in June this year to five years' imprisonment under the State's anti-conversion law and related provisions. They were accused of attempting to induce conversion while attending a child's birthday party. The Jabalpur High Court has since granted bail to all seven pending appeal.

The episode illustrates the danger. A neighbourhood dispute, an accusation and a law in which religious conversion becomes the central suspicion can quickly turn into a criminal prosecution. You may say that the courts will ultimately separate truth from falsehood. But why should an innocent citizen first have to spend time in prison, arrange money for bail and endure the stigma of being branded a conversion offender?

That is precisely why I object to the law. The fundamental problem is not merely that it can be misused. It is that the law creates a structure in which the private spiritual decision of an adult becomes an object of governmental scrutiny.

Imagine that tomorrow you decide that Jesus Christ is your Saviour and that you wish to become a Christian. I know you are unlikely to do so. But suppose you did. Under your law requiring prior notification to the authorities, you would have to disclose this deeply personal decision to the State before acting upon it.

Think about the absurdity of that situation. You are the Chief Minister. You announce that you have changed your faith. What would happen? Your political career would be finished, and you would become a political Pariah.
If this can happen to a powerful CM, imagine the vulnerability of a poor labourer, a tribal, a Dalit or an uneducated villager who decides to change his faith.

The Constitution protects freedom of conscience and the right to freely profess, practise, and propagate religion under Article 25. The framers did not say that a citizen must first obtain the State's permission to decide what to believe.

The Constituent Assembly debates are particularly instructive. Rev JJM Nichols-Roy, himself a member of the Assembly, strongly defended the freedom of conscience and the right to propagate religion. At the same time, he clearly opposed conversion through fraud, coercion or undue influence.

That is the distinction your law risks destroying: coercion and fraud are crimes; conviction of conscience is not. Indian Christians had participated in the constitutional process not by demanding a permanent communal political arrangement but by seeking constitutional guarantees of equality, freedom of conscience and religious liberty. This history is worth remembering because religious freedom was not handed to Christians as a favour. It was incorporated into the Constitution as part of the rights of all Indians.

You may also recall the example of Dr BR Ambedkar, one of the principal architects of the Constitution and a son of Maharashtra. On October 14, 1956, he embraced Buddhism at Nagpur's Deekshabhoomi along with a vast gathering of followers.

What if a law like yours had been applied to Ambedkar's decision? Would you have wanted the State to question him before allowing him to change his religion? Would you have wanted a district official to determine whether his conversion was genuine? Would you have wanted the police to investigate his motives? Surely not.

At least two prominent former BJP figures also demonstrate the absurdity of treating conversion as something inherently sinister. Udit Raj, who later became a Congress leader, was a BJP MP from North-West Delhi and had converted to Buddhism in 2001, after previously being known as Ram Raj. Arun Shourie, a former Union minister in the BJP-led government, has also described himself as a Buddhist.

If a former BJP MP can change his religion, why should an ordinary citizen be treated as a potential criminal for doing the same?

There is another serious problem with such legislation: it can reverse the normal burden of proof. Instead of the accuser having to establish coercion, fraud or unlawful inducement, the machinery of the law can place an extraordinary burden upon the accused to establish that the conversion was voluntary. That is dangerous because the presumption of innocence is a basic principle of criminal jurisprudence.

The provisions relating to marriages are equally troubling. By treating interfaith marriages through the prism of conversion, the law risks reinforcing the poisonous narrative of "love jihad." Two consenting adults should not have to prove to vigilantes, police officers or bureaucrats that their relationship is genuine simply because they belong to different faiths. Nor should prayer meetings become occasions for surveillance.

Reports emerging from Maharashtra even before the law formally came into force have shown the anxiety it has created. Some small churches have begun collecting declarations from worshippers stating that they attend prayer meetings voluntarily, apparently as a precaution against allegations of unlawful conversion.

Think about that for a moment. A person goes to a church to pray. Instead of experiencing freedom of worship, he or she may be asked to sign a declaration proving that the visit was voluntary. Is this the India we want?

I have seen for myself how easily the accusation of inducement can be manufactured. A few years ago, I visited a village in Uttarakhand where a small Christian community had become prosperous. The accusation against the pastor was predictable: he was allegedly giving the villagers money to convert.

I visited the pastor. He had a motorcycle and a refrigerator, virtually the only luxuries in his house.

The truth was very different. The money circulating among the families was largely their own. Christians traditionally practise tithing — giving one-tenth of their income to support the Church and its work. The pastor was supported by the congregation. And why had the villagers become more prosperous?

Alcoholism had been rampant. After becoming Christians, many stopped drinking. The money previously spent on alcohol was available for food, clothing and education. Their children benefited. Their standard of living improved. Was that bribery? Or was it simply the consequence of people changing their habits?

You may also hear allegations that Christians become prosperous because of foreign funds. That may happen in some cases, and where there is a violation of the law, the government is entitled to investigate. But to attribute every improvement in the life of a Christian family to foreign money is both lazy and prejudiced.

I once visited a church in Uttar Pradesh as the chief guest at its annual day. Ninety-nine per cent of the congregation consisted of people who had once lived as beggars. Many of the men had been alcoholics. Some had been involved in petty crimes. Almost all were illiterate. Their children begged on the streets. That congregation had changed dramatically.

The men had found work and were supporting their families. The children were going to school. The families were properly dressed. And something touched me deeply: women who had once been illiterate could read passages from the Bible instantly when the speaker asked them to do so. I must confess that I could not compete with those women.

Would you prefer them to have remained beggars, alcoholics and petty criminals so that nobody could accuse the Church of "conversion?" Surely the answer is no.

There is also a misconception about what Christians mean when they speak about service. The Church does not regard its work among the poor merely as "social work." A Christian believes that serving a hungry person, clothing someone who has nothing to wear or caring for someone abandoned by society is an act of service to God. Jesus commanded his followers to love their neighbours. He did not add the word "Christian" before "neighbours."

That is why Christians run schools, hospitals, orphanages and other institutions, often in remote and difficult parts of the country. It is also why missionaries and Christian organisations have worked for generations among tribal and marginalised communities. Go to a remote tribal area, and you will often find a Christian tribal family whose children are better educated, whose members are better dressed and who have moved from bare survival to a more dignified existence.

That is not necessarily the result of someone handing them money. Sometimes it is the result of education. Sometimes it is the result of healthcare. Sometimes it is the result of abandoning alcoholism. Sometimes it is simply the result of discovering that they, too, have dignity.

If somebody chooses Christianity because he believes it offers him spiritual truth, that is his constitutional right. If somebody chooses Buddhism because he is inspired by Ambedkar, that is his right. If somebody chooses Islam because he believes in Allah, that is his right. If somebody remains a Hindu because he finds truth in Ram or Krishna, that too is his right.

The State has no business choosing among these possibilities. Your law is therefore not merely about conversion. It is about the relationship between the citizen and the State. Imagine a law saying that a citizen who is a Communist today, a Congress supporter tomorrow and a BJP supporter the day after must inform the district collector before changing political affiliation. You would rightly call it ridiculous.

But religious belief is even more intimate than political preference. A political party is an organisation. Faith is a matter of conscience. If the State cannot tell me whom to vote for, why should it tell me whom to pray to?

If you keep changing the goalposts, you can score more goals. In the same way, if governments keep tightening the definition of unlawful conversion, more and more innocent people can be dragged into the criminal justice system.

But would that be the India for which our Constitution was written? I do not believe it is. I therefore appeal to you not as a Christian writing to a Hindu Chief Minister, but as an Indian citizen writing to another Indian citizen. You are a citizen first. Your religion comes afterwards.

The Constitution gives you the freedom to remain a Hindu. It also gives you the freedom, if your conscience ever takes you elsewhere, to become something else.

Please extend the same freedom to the poorest citizen of Maharashtra. Do not make the State an intermediary between a citizen and his or her conscience. Do not allow a law ostensibly designed to prevent coercion to become an instrument of coercion itself.

A democracy should be confident enough to trust its citizens. A secure religion does not need the police to protect it from another religion. And a confident government does not need a draconian law to protect it from less than one per cent of its population.

I wish you good health and hope that you will have the courage to protect the rights of those with whom you may profoundly disagree.

Yours etc.,