6 years: India's Supreme Court still won't rule on anti-conversion laws
August 12 was the day. It was there on the list. Six years of pleadings, 13 state statutes, applications for a stay pending since April 2025, and a date at last on the calendar of the Supreme Court of India.
The date came. The matter was not taken up.
For those outside India, it is worth explaining what file it is that the Court declines to open. Since 2020, a challenge has been pending to the constitutional validity of the anti-conversion laws now operating across a dozen states and more. In February, the Court issued notice to the Union government and to 12 states on a petition brought by the National Council of Churches in India. In January of this year, the matter was deferred.
It was listed again in May. It was listed for August 12. Nothing has been heard on the merits. Nothing has been stayed.
Meanwhile, the laws multiply. On July 31, the president gave assent to the Maharashtra Freedom of Religion Act, 2026, making Maharashtra the 13th state in India to police religious conversion by statute. The Archdiocese of Bombay issued a press note the same day setting out what the law does. It is worth reading slowly, because each clause is a door.
Words like allurement, undue influence and misrepresentation are left undefined and elastic, wide enough to swallow a village school. A blood relative may file a police complaint about an adult's change of faith without that adult's knowledge or consent. Police may act on their own initiative before any affected person has complained of anything. The burden of proof is reversed, and the offenses are non-bailable. Couples who marry across a religious line must submit to declaration procedures that expose them to public scrutiny for a choice that is theirs alone.
Let me say what the Archdiocese said, because it is my position also. The Church has always condemned conversion by force, fraud, coercion or inducement. No Christian can defend such practices, and I have never met one who tried. Our objection is not to the stated purpose of these laws. It is to what happens after they are passed.
Consider how quickly it happens. The Maharashtra Act came into force at the beginning of this month. Within four days, the police in Pune had registered the first case under it. A second followed almost immediately, this one against a British citizen holding an Overseas Citizen of India card, accused of inducing people to embrace Christianity and booked additionally under the immigration law on the theory that a foreign-origin cardholder requires permission to preach. This is what the new statute produces in its first week of life.
Not a rescued victim. A file.
For years I have put a single question to every government that passes such a law, and I put it again now. Produce the convictions. Not the first information reports. Not the arrests. Not the press conferences. After decades of these laws across more than a dozen states, and thousands of arrests, show me the men and women a court has actually found guilty of forced or fraudulent conversion.
For years the answer was none at all. Then, in January 2025, the state produced its exhibit: Jose and Sheena Pappachan, a Christian couple who had worked among Dalit communities in Uttar Pradesh, became the first people convicted under that state's law, sentenced to five years. Both are now free on bail, their convictions under appeal, the evidence dismissed by Christian monitors as insubstantial. One conviction challenged and still unsettled, after years of the most aggressively enforced anti-conversion regime in the country. That is the harvest.
Set it against the arrests. In Uttar Pradesh, by November 2022, some 291 cases had been registered and 507 people arrested under the state Act, and not one has been convicted. Not one of the 507 had been convicted. By the middle of 2024, the figures had passed 800 cases and 1,600 arrests, and still no case had returned a guilty verdict. In 2025, there were roughly 400 arrests of Christians. About 600 people were released from custody and more than 170 were acquitted by the courts. Thousands of lives disrupted. A single, disputed conviction to justify all of it.
That is not law enforcement. It is punishment by procedure. The arrest, the cell, the lost job, the ruined name, all of it delivered before a judge has found anything at all. One of our own pastors in Rajasthan spent more than four months in prison before he was granted bail. He was not convicted of anything. He was simply taken, and held, and the four months are gone.
The men who draft these statutes understand this perfectly. The conviction rate is not a failure of the law. It is the law working as intended. And there is a second effect, which is worse. These statutes tell the vigilante that his prejudice has been adopted as public policy. He arrives before the police do.
India calls itself the largest democracy on earth. That claim is not measured by the size of the electorate. It is measured by what a citizen may do in the years between elections: what he may believe, whom he may marry, where he may pray. Freedom of conscience is the first freedom, because every other freedom assumes a mind the state does not own. Remove it, and what remains is arithmetic.
Nor is the appetite confined to the churches. In July, young people filled Jantar Mantar in Delhi over leaked examination papers and were answered with batons and tear gas. Some 150 were taken to hospital after the march on July 20. They had sung, they had danced, they had mocked the water cannon, and the machinery reached, as it always reaches, for the word anti-national. A state that cannot bear a song from its own children will not long tolerate a hymn from its minorities.
I do not say this lightly, and I have spent more than 50 years in ministry in this country: The Indian state has, for now, become anti-Christian. The record of the past year cannot be reconciled with the story India tells the world about itself. Open Doors places India 12th among the countries where Christians face the severest pressure. In 2013, it stood 31st. We are 2.3% of the population.
To my brothers and sisters in the West, I say only this. Do not repeat back to India the story India tells about itself. When your governments and your newspapers describe a nation of exemplary pluralism, ask them the question I have asked here. Ask for the convictions. And pray for the pastor in the cell in Rajasthan, and for the ones whose names have not reached you.
To the Supreme Court of India, I say what I have said before, and it is not an appeal to discover a problem. The Court already holds the file. Six years. Thirteen states. Hear the cases. Rule on the stay.
Delay is itself a ruling, and everyone booked under these laws already knows how it reads.
Archbishop Joseph D’Souza is an internationally renowned human and civil rights activist. He is the founder of Dignity Freedom Network, an organization that advocates for and delivers humanitarian aid to the marginalized and outcastes of South Asia. He is archbishop of the Anglican Good Shepherd Church of India and serves as the President of the All India Christian Council.
