Mystery over: Law Ministry did give its view on anti-conversion law

NEW DELHI: The mystery over different claims by the law and home ministries on an anticonversion law has been solved. The home ministry had not proposed any bill or sought an opinion on a national anticonversion law but the law ministry offered its views to the parliamentary ministry following a private members bill – moved by Shiv Sena Lok Sabha MP Sadashiv Lokhande in February – and sent a copy of its views to the home ministry.

“There is no proposal to make an anti-conversion law. The government has been clear in Parliament that there first needs to be a debate on such a law among political parties, social organisations and religious institutions. Only then a process to make any such law can start…the home ministry had initiated no such proposal,” a senior home ministry official confirmed to ET.

Law Minister Sadanand Gowda had told ET on April 15, “no such bill or proposal” for a bill to prevent religious conversion by force or inducement had been forwarded to his ministry from the MHA. It now transpires that the law ministry was attending to a query from the parliamentary affairs ministry regarding Lokhande’s bill in the Lok Sabha for a ban on forced conversions. The reply of the law ministry rejecting such a proposed legislation was apparently marked to the home ministry, according to a home ministry official. “In any case, the law ministry’s opinion is clear that conversions are a state subject and such a bill is not possible as a central law,” the home ministry official said.

Lokhande bill, Prohibition on Religious Conversion (By inducement or force) Bill, 2015, had said the law will not apply on people who voluntarily converts to another religion or reconverts to his or her original religion and proposed a jail term of up to 10 years for those indulging in forced conversions and a fine of Rs one lakh.