Rajasthan’s retrograde move

Now that the BJP government in Rajasthan has decided to send back the regressive anti-conversion Bill to governor Pratibha Patil, the latter must do what she ought to have done in the first instance: reserve it for the President’s consideration. The Rajasthan Dharma Swatantrya Bill, 2006, proposes to ban “forcible” conversions by making them severely punishable. Patil had, while returning the Bill to the state government, recommended that it be forwarded to President A P J Abdul Kalam. That was secularist tokenism. It smacked of poor knowledge of the law, or lack of gubernatorial will, or both. The Constitution empowers the governor to reserve a Bill for the President’s assent. There is, however, no provision by which she can recommend that the House do so. She should have known that the BJP government, given its persistently anti-minority record, would not heed her recommendation. In fact, Patil, if she had really wanted to prevent the Bill from becoming law, should simply have, under the provisions of Article 200 of the Constitution, withheld her assent (indefinitely). Besides, even now she can fault the government’s decision to send back the Bill on constitutional grounds. A state government cannot send a Bill back to its governor, like it has in Rajasthan, without tabling it in the House/Houses again.
To argue that the anti-conversion legislation in Rajasthan is tenable merely because similar laws, enacted by governments of Orissa and Madhya Pradesh, received the Supreme Court’s sanction in 1977, would be as ill-informed as the apex court judgement itself. The 1977 verdict, which interpreted the “right to propagate” one’s religion in Article 25 of the Constitution to mean, not the right to convert, “but to transmit or spread one’s religion by an exposition of its tenets”, contradicts the spirit of the Constitution. The five-judge bench, which passed the verdict, had sought to interpret the word propagate in a narrow sense by glossing over the meaning — implying conversion — that was ascribed to it during the Constituent Assembly debates. That is wholly consistent with the philosophical ethos of a modern, post-Enlightenment society in which people can choose and change their religion.


-- The Economic Times Editorial