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Karnataka bill seeks to declare interfaith marriages involving conversion ‘null & void’

The bill defines ‘promise of marriage' as ‘allurement’, makes 30-day notice to magistrate mandatory, spells out quantum of punishment. Opposition leaders tear up copies writes ANUSHA RAVI SOOD in The Print



File photo of the Karnataka Assembly in Bengaluru. | PTI


If passed by the Assembly in its current form, Karnataka’s anti-conversion bill will empower the state to deem interfaith marriages involving conversion “null & void”.

Karnataka Home Minister Araga Jnanendra Tuesday introduced a bill to regulate and penalise religious conversions in the state.

The Karnataka Protection of Right to Freedom of Religion Bill, 2021, known simply as the ‘anti-conversion bill’, has categorised as “allurements” the promise of marriage, free education, free medical treatment and jobs, and hence terms them unlawful reasons for religious conversion.

According to the bill, the term “religious convertor” will be applicable to anyone in the post of “Father, Priest, Purohit, Pandit, Moulvi or Mulla”.

Under the bill, a person planning to convert or a ‘convertor’ has to give a 30-day prior notice to the district magistrate about the conversion. A declaration is to be given even after conversion.

Those found guilty of converting others unlawfully can attract a punishment of three to five years in jail and a fine of Rs 25,000, the bill says. The punishment is higher if the converted person is a minor, a woman, person belonging to the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes or “of unsound mind”.

Persons organising “mass conversions” are also liable to be punished.

Conversion to previous religion exempt

“The bill seeks to prohibit religious conversion by misrepresentation, force, undue influence, coercion, allurement or by any fraudulent means,” Karnataka Home Minister Jnanendra said while introducing the bill.

The bill also prohibits conversion for the purpose of marriage and seeks to deem such marriages void.

“Any marriage which has happened with the sole purpose of unlawful conversion or vice-versa by the man of one religion with the woman of another religion, either by converting himself before or after marriage or by converting the woman before or after marriage, shall be declared as null and void,” the bill states.

While the bill seeks to punish those involved and aiding “unlawful” religious conversion, it has been careful to exempt people reconverting to their “immediate previous religion”. People reconverting to their previous religion, in fact, won’t even be considered as ‘conversion’ under this law.
Free hand to raise objections, file complaint

The anti-conversion bill also frames voluntary religious conversion within a series of registration, notification, calls for objection and multiple rounds of enquiry.

The bill calls for all offences under the law to be non-bailable and cognisable, and defines “mass conversion” as an event where even two or more people are converted.

It gives anyone a free hand to raise objections and file complaints of suspected conversion.

“Any converted person, his parents, brother, sister or any other person who is related to him by blood, marriage or adoption or in any form associated or colleague may lodge a complaint of such conversion,” the bill reads.

While the bill doesn’t blanket-ban religious conversion, it makes the process to convert tedious, with options for anybody to file objections to an individual’s decision to convert.
 
Declaration before magistrate & after conversion

Any person wanting to convert to another religion or any convertor who wants to conduct a conversion should mandatorily make a declaration 30 days in advance to the district magistrate. Separate forms have been designed for this purpose.

The declaration is then notified on the notice board for public scrutiny, so that anybody might object. If any objection is received, an inquiry will be conducted through the revenue or social welfare department to ascertain the intention, purpose and cause of the proposed conversion, the bill says.

If the district magistrate concludes that the conversion is “unlawful”, police action will be initiated.

The bill also demands declaration after the fact of religious conversion.

Once again, a person who has converted will have to declare it before the magistrate within 30 days and it will be posted for public scrutiny on notice boards for anyone to object.

“The District Magistrate shall notify religious conversion on the notice board of the office of the District Magistrate and in the office of the Tahsildar and will call for objections in such cases where no objections were called earlier,” the bill says.

The declaration must contain personal details of the converted person — date of birth, permanent address, present place of residence, father’s/husband’s name, the religion to which the converted person originally belonged and the religion to which he has converted, the date and place of conversion and the nature of the conversion process, along with copies of ID cards or Aadhaar card.

The converted person will then have to appear before the magistrate in person. If objections are received the same enquiry procedure is followed to approve the conversion or deem it void.

If the enquiry concludes the conversion to be “lawful”, the person’s records are reclassified, which may affect his entitlement to grants and benefits under government schemes.
Quantum of punishment

The Bill puts women, minors and “persons of unsound mind” in the same category.

Under the bill, individuals converting others via “unlawful” means will attract punishment of three to five years in jail and a fine of Rs 25,000.

If the converted person is a minor, woman, a person belonging to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes or “of unsound mind”, the punishment will be three to 10 years in prison, with a fine of Rs 50,000.

Those organising mass conversions “unlawfully” face three to 10 years in jail, with fine of Rs 1 lakh.

The bill demands that the ‘accused’ pay Rs 5 lakh compensation to the victim of a forced conversion, excluding the fine imposed by the courts. Repeat offences will attract a sentence of five years in jail and a fine of Rs 2 lakh.

The bill also proposes to stop all government aid and grants to institutions involved in “unlawful conversions”, apart from punishing the heads of such institutions.

The burden of proof of innocence will lie with the accused under the law, instead of the prosecution having to prove the offence.

Furthermore, the bill seeks to make anyone who has aided or abetted an offence under the law as “parties to the offence”, whether or not they themselves carried it out. 
‘Unconstitutional’, says Opposition

The bill was met with severe opposition from the Congress and Janata Dal (Secular) (JD-S), who accused the government of trying to introduce the bill “on the sly”.

Karnataka Congress president D.K. Shivakumar even tore up copies of the bill, deeming it “unconstitutional” and accusing the government of sneaking the bill into the House without discussing it in the Business Advisory Committee or listing it as business of the House for Tuesday.

The bill was made part of the supplementary business for the afternoon session on Tuesday, right before the House reconvened.

“We oppose even the introduction of this bill that violates constitutional rights of citizens,” said Siddaramaiah of the Congress, leader of the Opposition.

Speaker of the Assembly Vishweshwara Hegde Kageri said the bill will be taken up for discussion Wednesday.

Sickness in Indian Democracy did not start with Modi

Tavleen Singh in The Indian Express


Three words that I got sick of hearing as the Karnataka drama unfolded last week were: democracy, secularism and Constitution. Nearly everyone who spoke them meant only one thing, and this was that the Bharatiya Janata Party must be kept out of Karnataka at all costs. Perhaps, by the time you read this, the BJP juggernaut will have been stopped from finding a toehold in southern India, but it is important that we remember that whatever happens, it will have nothing to do with those three words. 

It is important also to remember that the post-election drama in Karnataka had everything to do with the Congress party’s desperation to keep its own little toe grounded in the state they have ruled for five years. Without Karnataka, our oldest political party has only Punjab and Puducherry left, and this is very bad news. How will Rahul Gandhi continue to dream of becoming prime minister in 2019? How will there be enough funds to fight the Lok Sabha elections if one of India’s richest states slips away? So even the most humiliating compromise with a party derided by Rahul Gandhi as the B-team of the BJP is better than losing power altogether. You realise what a sham ‘secularism’ has become if you remember that during the campaign the (S) in the party’s name was mocked by Congress leaders as standing for Sangh and not secular.

Now let us talk about democracy. Even as B S Yedyurappa was taking his oath of office last Thursday, the president of the Congress party tweeted this: ‘This morning, while the BJP celebrates its hollow victory, India will mourn the defeat of democracy.’ He clearly forgot that if there was one conclusive thing that came out of the election results, it was that it was a mandate against the incumbent Congress government.

On constitutional proprieties the less said the better. They were stretched and moulded last week by most politicians and political commentators to make whichever case they wished to make. What can be said for certain is that the men who wrote our Constitution never envisaged a situation in which the verdict of governors would be challenged by violent thugs on the streets. Or that newly elected legislators would need to be locked up in fine hotels to prevent them from selling their souls for filthy lucre.

It is not as if they need the money. The Karnataka Election Watch and Association for Democratic Reforms analysed the assets of 221 newly elected MLAs and found that 97 per cent were ‘crorepatis’. Of these, 16 had assets worth more than Rs 100 crore. You do not need me to tell you that the main reason why Indians fight and sometimes kill for a ticket to contest elections is because there is no easier way to become very rich very quickly.

This sickness in our democracy did not begin after Narendra Modi became prime minister. But, it is this storyline that has been sought to be disseminated by secular, leftist political commentators in order to disguise their loyalties to the Congress party. It is this ‘secular’ caboodle that uses words like democracy and secularism most often. Sadly, they see the weaknesses in our democracy through tinted lenses. So what happened in West Bengal’s panchayat elections last week has been almost ignored by liberal, leftist commentators. In these village elections, ballot boxes were torn out of polling booths and thrown in ponds, and gangs of armed thugs wandered about violently preventing people from voting. These events escaped the notice of ‘secular’ politicians and commentators who moan endlessly about how democracy has died in the past four years. Rahul went so far as to say in Chhattisgarh that India has become a dictatorship.

To support this ludicrous charge, the Congress president has exalted disgruntled judges who actively harmed the Supreme Court by going public with their disgruntlement. Disgruntled public intellectuals have also sided with the judges and the ‘secular’ media has done its best to provide a platform for their views.

Having lived through that time when there really was a Dictator ruling India, I can report that journalists, writers and poets were jailed for speaking out. It was also a time when disobedient judges got the sack. So the Supreme Court obsequiously went along with the Dictator’s diktat when she ordered them to suspend even the right to life. When the Dictator’s grandson now makes reckless charges, he needs to be reminded of that one period of Indian history when democracy nearly died.

Modi is no match for the powerful elite who lost their vast influence in the public square when he became prime minister. So now when he appears to have lost some of his magic, they have taken charge of the narrative and their message is clear: democracy is doomed if Modi remains in power.

The serpent in the garden

The IPL is representative of the worst sides of Indian capitalism and Indian society

Ramachandra Guha

June 1, 2013

I detest wearing a tie, and do so only when forced. One such occasion was a formal dinner at All Souls College, Oxford, where opposite me was an Israeli scholar who had just got a job at the University, and was extremely anxious to show how well he knew its ways and mores. He dropped some names, and spoke of his familiarity with the manuscripts collection at "Bodley" (the Bodleian Library). In between his boasts he kept scrutinising my tie. Then, when he could contain his curiosity no more, he walked across the table, took my tie in his hand, looked at it ever more closely, and asked: "Is this Magdalene?"

I did not answer. How could I? For the tie signalled not membership of a great old Oxford College, but of a rather more obscure institution, the Friends Union Cricket Club in Bangalore. I joined the club in 1963, aged five, because my uncle, a legendary one-handed cricketer named N Duraiswamy, played for it. I would go along with him for practice, stand by the side of the net, and at the end of the day be allowed to bowl a few balls from 12 yards or thereabouts. By the time I was ten I was helping lay the mat and nail it to the ground. When I reached my teens I was bowling from where everyone else did.

As a boy and young man, I was an episodic member of the Friends Union Cricket Club. In those years I was based in North India, and came south for my summer and winter holidays. In 1994 I moved to Bangalore for good. In the past two decades, I have watched FUCC win the First Division Championship three times, and seen a series of young players graduate from club cricket to representing the state in the Ranji Trophy. My club has produced two India internationals and at least fifteen Karnataka players, all of whom I have known personally and/or watched play.

Largely because of Duraiswami - who has been captain or manager for forty years now - FUCC enjoys a reputation that is high both in cricketing and ethical terms. No cricketer of the club has ever tried to use influence to gain state selection. Where other clubs sometimes adjust games to make sure they do not get relegated, FUCC does not resort to this. FUCC cricketers do not come late for practice, and never abuse the umpire. And they play some terrific cricket too.

FUCC was one of a dozen clubs that provided the spine of Karnataka cricket. The others included Jawahars, Crescents, BUCC, Swastic, Bangalore Cricketers, and City Cricketers. The men who ran those clubs were likewise personally honest as well as fantastically knowledgeable about the game. The cricketers they produced won Karnataka six Ranji Trophy titles, and won India many Tests and one-day internationals too.

This year I mark the 50th anniversary of my membership of the Friends Union Cricket Club. In this time, FUCC has commanded my primary cricketing loyalty; followed by my state, Karnataka, and only then by India. Six years ago, however, a new club and a new format entered my city and my life. I was faced with a complicated decision - should I now add a fresh allegiance, to the Royal Challengers Bangalore?

I decided I would not, mostly because I disliked the promoter. In cricketing terms, Vijay Mallya was the Other of Duraiswami. He had never played cricket, nor watched much cricket either. He had no knowledge of its techniques or its history. He had come into the sport on a massive ego trip, to partake of the glamour and celebrity he saw associated with it. He would buy his way into Indian cricket. And so he did.

It was principally because Mallya was so lacking in the dedicated selflessness of the cricketing coaches and managers I knew, that I decided the RCB would not be my team. So, although I am a member of the Karnataka State Cricket Association and have free entry into its grounds, I continued to reserve that privilege for Ranji Trophy and Test matches alone.

The KSCA Stadium is named for its former president, M Chinnaswamy, who was one of Duraiswami's heroes. When I was growing up, Durai would tell me of how Chinnaswamy supervised the building of the stadium, brick by brick. This great lover of cricket abandoned his lucrative law practice for months on end, monitoring the design, the procurement of materials, and the construction, with no cost over-runs and absolutely no commissions either.

	The behaviour of Messrs Lalit Modi and N Srinivasan cannot shock or surprise me, but I have been distressed at the way in which some respected cricket commmentators have become apologists for the IPL and its management

In other ways too Chinnaswamy was exemplary. Never, in all the years he served the KSCA, did he try to manipulate a single selection. Later, when he became president of the BCCI, he met the challenge of Kerry Packer by increasing the fees per Test match tenfold. It was while he ran Indian cricket that our players were for the first time treated with dignity and paid a decent wage.

I wonder what Chinnaswamy would have made of his grasping, greedy, successors as presidents of BCCI. I wonder, too, what he would have made of a man who can't pay his own employees having a free run of the stadium that Chinnaswamy so lovingly built. This past April, the Bengaluru edition of the Hindu carried a front-page story on an summons that the Special Court for Economic Offences had issued to Mallya, who owed the Income Tax Department some Rs75 crores, or about $13.3 million, which he had not paid despite repeated reminders. The police, often waiving the rules for the powerful, told the court that they were too busy to execute the summons.

But let me not single out Mallya here. The truth is that almost all the owners of IPL teams (seven out of nine, by one estimate) are being investigated by one government agency or another, in one country or another, for economic offences of one kind or another. Since this is a shady operation run by shady characters, Indian companies known for their professionalism, entrepreneurial innovation, and technical excellence have stayed away from the IPL altogether. Here is a question for those who still think the tournament is worth defending - why is it that companies like the Tatas, the Mahindras, or Infosys have not promoted an IPL team? (Editor's note - Tata Consultancy Services sponsor Rajasthan Royals.)

To this writer, that the IPL was corrupt from top to bottom (and side to side) was clear from the start - which is why I have never exercised my right of free entry for its matches in Bengaluru. But as I watched the tournament unfold, I saw also that it was deeply divisive in a sociological sense. It was a tamasha for the rich and upwardly mobile living in the cities of southern and western India. Rural and small town India were largely left out, as were the most populous states. That Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, both of whom have excellent Ranji Trophy records, had no IPL team between them, while Maharashtra had two, was symptomatic of the tournament's identification with the powerful and the moneyed. The entire structure of the IPL was a denial of the rights of equal citizenship that a truly "national" game should promote.

The IPL is representative of the worst sides of Indian capitalism and Indian society. Corrupt and cronyist, it has also promoted chamchagiri and compliance. The behaviour of Messrs Lalit Modi and N Srinivasan cannot shock or surprise me, but I have been distressed at the way in which some respected cricket commmentators have become apologists for the IPL and its management. Theirs is a betrayal that has wounded the image of cricket in India, and beyond. George Orwell once said: "A writer should never be a loyal member of a political party." Likewise, for his credibility and even his sanity, a cricket writer/commentator should keep a safe distance from those who run the game in his country.

What is to be done now? The vested interests are asking for such token measures as the legalisation of betting and the resignation of the odd official. In truth, far more radical steps are called for. The IPL should be disbanded. The Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy, played between state sides, should be upgraded, making it the flagship Twenty20 tournament in the country. Then the clubs and state associations that have run our domestic game reasonably well for the past 80 years would be given back their authority, and the crooks and the moneybags turfed out altogether.

Even now, in every city and town in India, there are selfless cricket coaches and administrators active, nurturing young talent, supervising matches and leagues. The way to save Indian cricket is to allow these modern-day equivalents of Duraiswami and M Chinnaswamy to take charge once more.

Middle Class Fundamentalism

The conceit of the anti-democrat

HARISH KHARE

  

Those who do not subscribe to the elite narrative on corruption are considered politically backward and their democratic choices unworthy of respect

The recent Karnataka Assembly vote has apparently disappointed the self-styled ideologues of the Indian middle class. These baffled theologians are wondering aloud how voters in Karnataka could opt for the very political party against whom the entire middle class had risen to its last MBA. How could the electorate not be influenced by the two-year-old high-pitched campaign against the “corrupt Congress,” launched by the upper middle-class dominated media, both electronic and print? Was not Bangalore one of the epicentres of the anti-corruption dharmayudha, led by the very venerable Santosh Hegde? How could the voters be so indifferent to the corporate-endorsed “good” candidates? There must be something terribly wrong with the poor if they are not buying into the upper middle class quest for the nobility of an honest society.

Perhaps the Karnataka vote has come just in time. For one thing, the vote punctures the self-serving assumption that the entire country subscribes to the Khan Market-centric narrative on corruption and governance. The disappointment among upper middle class theologians is perhaps sharper because it was only four months ago that the great oracle, Thomas Friedman, visited India and announced and hailed the birth of a “virtual middle class” as “one of the most exciting things happening on the planet.” The ayatollah from the land of platitudes and pretensions had predicted that the new “virtual middle class” would dominate and determine the destiny of India! And, now, an unenlightened electorate in Karnataka has proved such a spoilsport. The voters are dismissed by the new arbiters of civic virtues as ethically deficient and politically backward for voting the Congress.

These theologians of the upper middle class supremacy are entitled to their disappointment. But what should be a matter of concern to all who value social fairness and democratic equity is the elite conceit — that those who pride themselves on their new prosperity have achieved their current superior status entirely on their merit, based on individual talent and personally acquired skills, and that these meritorious achievements ipso facto elevate the class to a higher level of nobility, a superior morality, ethics and good taste. These upper middle class ideologues would not want to be reminded that they themselves are a product of an unfair system in an unequal society. But having made it good in this tainted and corrupt system, and having gained access to the global job market, these upper middle class fundamentalists now want the state and its institutions to turn their back on the poor and the have-nots. Any attempt at inclusive politics and economics is suspect in the eyes of these promoters of the elite virtues and values.

For now the middle class ideologues assert that they are entitled to a corruption free political order. Fine. To worry about corruption is in itself a desirable social good. It is even a noble quest. The trouble is that this overweening preoccupation with a corruption-free polity is not so innocent a pose.

The proposition is that so debilitating and so pervasive has corruption become that the nation can and must suspend all its beliefs and, instead, any leader or political party, presumably unstained by corruption, can be safely trusted to take the correct position on grand issues like the nature of economic growth, social order, foreign policy issues, the terms of our relationship with Pakistan or China, the place of the minorities and other weaker sections of society in the scheme of things, nature of federal polity, etc. According to the middle class ideologues, all these contestations — the very core of our political divide — can be relegated to the back burner, and our collective energies should be devoted to a single point agenda of a corruption-free society.

POLITICIANS AS ONLY VILLAINS

In their over-insistence on corruption, the upper middle class ideologues introduce another distortion: an exclusive focus on political leaders as the sole villains in the corrupt drama. This demonisation of the politician diverts critical attention away from the connivance, criminality and corruption of the business classes in each of the recent scams. If there has been a loot of natural resources, the most obvious instigator and beneficiaries of this unholy scramble are the corporate houses, some dubious and some not so dubious. Yet the middle classes-led narrative would like us to believe that it is only the bent politician who suborns the honest businessman’s ethics. All these innocent gentlemen need to be forced to serve a sentence of hard political education of at least three months in Jharkhand to understand the dynamics of this jugal bandi between the crooked entrepreneur and the corrupt politician.

The disappointment with the Karnataka vote reveals another charming vanity: the media is an honest conveyer of society’s anxieties and anger. Increasingly this claim no longer stands a close scrutiny. Sensitive and vigilant observers of the Indian media are worried about the emerging pattern of media ownership. It is a matter of deep democratic disappointment that none of the self-appointed mullahs of the anti-corruption jihad has ever gathered the personal courage or summoned the intellectual honesty to talk about the unhealthy convergence of media ownership and corporate houses. Nor, for that matter, has anyone dared to point out how judicial indulgence has become readily available to almost every crooked fund collector.

Perhaps the most troublesome arrogance is that these theologians of upper-class and upper-caste superiority have arrogated to themselves the right to speak for the entire range of middle classes. In sociological terms, such claims are totally untenable.

The most numerical component of the “virtual middle class” is a new and different sociological category. For want of a better word, let us call this group the post-slum middle class: this category should include those vast numbers who have just escaped the indignities and ugliness of the slums — shared toilets, open bathing space, and fights over erratic water supply — and have moved into tenements of their own, who now have the financial leeway to send a daughter to high school and a son to a computer centre. It is this group of new citizens who are experiencing for the first time a kind of comfort with some degree of economic sufficiency; and, they may be products of the new market but they still need and depend upon a caring state, a functional police force, an affordable education system, a working health care arrangement.

Certainly the dreams of the post-slum classes are not the same as those dreamt in the cosmopolitan cities’ gated communities, who organise their private security and where the “struggle” is over whether or not to buy admission for the mediocre son in a mediocre Australian university.

MIDDLE CLASS FUNDAMENTALISTS

It is obvious that our desi middle class fundamentalists look upon the American system as the ideal model of rectitude and efficiency, and good governance. They dare us to aspire to these global (read American) standards of good politics. They feel doubly empowered when a visiting American columnist pats our “civil society” for performing all those rites of anger and protest at India Gate. In this narrative, the American political arrangement and the processes are wonderfully free of corruption. What touching innocence. As if the American politicians, despite having spent more than $ 15 billion in the last presidential election, somehow remain immune to the demands of the fund-raisers; or as if successive British Prime Ministers have not reduced themselves to being salesmen for this or that London-based economic interest.

This is not the first time that democratic India has been sought to be imposed upon by an elitist mindset. Behind the breath-taking arrogance of the new anti-corruption jihadists there is a deeply disturbing conceit: if a free and fair electoral exercise does not produce a result to the liking of the upper middle class mullahs, then that very democratic process is not worthy of their respect and is of doubtful legitimacy. This elitist presumptuousness is the very anti-thesis of democratic ethos and deserves to be rejected.