Justice GR Swaminathan might as well put down his judge's gown and permanently take up a saffron dhoti, since his actions do not conform to the office he holds. He has definitively abandoned his judicial role and taken up the Hindutva agenda when he moved from examining an organisation's conduct to making sweeping judgments about the character of entire religions.

The case concerns a Zen meditation centre founded by Fr. Ama Samy, a Catholic priest. The legal question was whether the Kanzeon Public Charitable Trust had correctly disclosed its religious character while applying for FCRA registration.

Propaganda has become so entrenched that religious generalisations are already a substitute for sound reasoning and are becoming the basis for unequal treatment by the state. His logic was undeniably asymmetric, with no evidentiary basis for his claim and clearly influenced by stereotypes.

Article 25 protects the freedom to profess, practise, and propagate religion, but it does not confer a fundamental right to convert another person by force, fraud, or improper inducement. Justice Swaminathan declared that "radical Christian Institutions are notorious" for conversion, while adding that he was not accusing the Trust of such an agenda. If there was no finding of unlawful conversion, why introduce this suspicion? Conversion is not synonymous with coercion, fraud or inducement except in the saffron-tinted Ghar Wapsi programme.

If conversion warrants judicial scrutiny, so must coercion, intimidation and violence committed in its name or in opposition to it. A constitutional court must protect people's freedom to believe their faith is true, while equally protecting others' freedom to reject it.

Why should philosophical teaching rooted in Hindu traditions be readily classified as culture, while a Buddhist tradition with Chinese historical origins invites suspicion? Can the Bible, Quran, Buddhist scriptures and Christian theological texts not also be studied as philosophy, history, literature or culture?

This is not an isolated controversy. Justice Swaminathan has previously said that the Constitution's survival depends on the country's "demographic profile." He has publicly recalled securing an acquittal for a friend who had killed a person only on the lack of an eyewitness and declared: "If you protect the Vedas, the Vedas will protect you." More than 100 INDIA bloc MPs had sought his impeachment. Allegations also include "undue favouritism" toward senior advocate M. Sricharan Ranganathan in deciding cases, along with "favouring advocates from a particular community."

A judge is entitled to religious beliefs. But the Constitution demands that those beliefs never determine how the judiciary judges citizens. The judiciary cannot become an arena for validating the ideological preferences of any religious or political establishment.