NEW DELHI: Akhil Bhartiya Sant Samiti, which claims to signify 127 sects of Sanathan Dharma, moved Supreme Court docket on Thursday in assist of anti-conversion legal guidelines framed by totally different states and whose validity has come underneath court docket’s scanner.In search of intervention within the ongoing litigation on a batch of petitions difficult the legal guidelines handed by Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, the physique filed its software by way of advocate Atulesh Kumar and supported the legal guidelines. It contended that the liberty to propagate faith doesn’t confer a proper to transform one other particular person and the liberty of conscience of the possible convert is equally protected.It stated the state legal guidelines don’t forbid voluntary conversion based mostly on free and knowledgeable selection and so they narrowly regulate solely these acts of conversion which might be vitiated by drive, fraud, allurement, undue affect or sham marriage.“It is submitted that even if propagation is treated as part of religious practice, still proselytisation achieved through force, fraud, coercion, undue influence, allurement or sham marriage cannot be asserted as an essential or integral religious practice. It is further submitted that such practices militate against the basic ethos of the Constitution- dignity, equality, freedom of conscience, and public order– and offend the founding civilisational principles of mutual respect and non-compulsion in matters of faith. Activities that impair another’s freedom of conscience or threaten public order are amenable to regulation, and the State is duty bound to do the same. Accordingly, the impugned statutes do not trench upon core religious tenets but only interdict impermissible means, leaving voluntary, informed choice untouched,” the petition stated.“The impugned statutes are religion-neutral and content-neutral measures of general application that protect freedom of conscience rather than target any creed. They neither proscribe voluntary conversion nor criminalise inter-faith marriage per se; they address only conversions vitiated by defined wrongful means or marriages undertaken solely as an instrumentality for such conversion. The provisions are precisely framed to incorporate appropriate men’s rea and graded penalties, and are coupled with procedural safeguards (verification/hearing by designated authorities),” it stated.
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