Is religious conversion really a fundamental right, or can we ban it?

By Jaideep A Prabhu To most observers, India appears a paradox - teeming with diversity of cuisine, dress, language, pigmentation, and faith under one flag, yet simultaneously simmering with communal tensions. As Jakob de Roover of Ghent University argues, the liberal principle of religious freedom implicitly endorses the Abrahamic view of the world that religion revolves around doctrines and truth claims and citizens should be able to not just choose in the free market of religious ideas but persuade others of one’s convictions. Makau Mutua of the State University of New York, Buffalo, exposes the inherent bias of religious liberty by arguing that the doctrine does not level the playing field for all religions but creates an obligation on Dharmic systems - for which they are not culturally geared - to compete as Abrahamic faiths do. All democratic societies realise that freedoms are not infinite; as a result, international declarations such as the UN Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief, the Unesco Declaration of Principles on Tolerance, or the European Convention on Human Rights allow the limiting of religious freedom if it is necessary in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. A complete ban on proselytism and religious conversion in India is hardly a curb on freedom of religious thought - from the Dharmic perspective, it is only a ban on religious thought of an exclusivist and binary nature; yet Abrahamic religions cannot abandon their doctrines of exclusive truth without violating their core principles.