“India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend and the great grand mother of tradition.”
Recently, the Delhi District Court at Dwarka passed a scathing order against the chief of the Indian Medical association, cautioning him against using his position to propagate Christianity; the Court observed, “saying Christianity and Allopathy are same, and a gift of western world would be the most inaccurate assertion.” The Court warned him against that taking the umbrage of the Indian Medical Association to propagate his personal beliefs, and asked him to focus on the welfare of the medical fraternity. But, this is just one case which has come to the limelight, different people, of different religions often use their personal positions of privilege to spread their religious beliefs.
Their defense is Article 25(1) of the Constitution, “all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practice and propagate religion”. But, the fundamental difference which these people ignore lies in proselytization versus propagation. Propagation is simply to “transmit or spread one's religion by an exposition of its tenets” but, proselytization is an attempt to convert someone to one's own religious faith; the law permits propagation of religion, which is a fundamental right, as upheld by the Apex Court in Stanislaus Rev vs. State of Madhya Pradesh, a landmark judgement where the top court also emphasized that the right to propagate your religion does not include the right to convert.
The Court while upholding the constitutional validity of laws by certain state legislatures against forceful conversions said, “the Article does not grant the right to convert other persons to one’s own religion but to transmit or spread one’s religion by an exposition of its tenets.” But, on the other side of the coin is the fact that this ruling also opened up a Pandora’s box for Governments driven by political interests to make more anti-conversion laws which indirectly attack on the fundamental rights of those professing minority religions. Furthermore, state interference in marriages was looked down upon by the Supreme Court in the Hadiya case, which emphasized that right to marry a person of one’s choice is integral to Article 21, thereby making it a fundamental right.
Such laws come in the teeth of this judgement. They also contribute to religious discrimination against minorities because of the manner in which political leaders publicize these laws.
A friend of the author has been called as a rice-bag convert just because she is a Christian; this exhibits the heightening religious differences in our great country, a path each one of us should be sorry we are treading on because, the fact is that secularism is one of our founding principles, a part of the basic structure of our Constitution, as was highlighted by the Supreme Court in the Kesavananda Bharati case, and reiterated in the S.R. Bommai case.
The fact is that freedom of conscience (the right to believe in one’s faith), and the freedom to propagate our own religion does not give us the right to look down upon people of another religion, neither does it give us the power to thrust our religion, our beliefs on someone else because no faith, and no religion has ever told us that it is superior than the others, religions teach us equality, they teach us to live in harmony with one another, they teach us love, for the fact is "Mazhab nahi sikhata, sapas mein bair rakhna".
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