ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an analysis of the debates over conversion to Christianity in India since 1947, focusing on how these debates have played out within proposed and enacted anti-conversion legislation at the state and federal levels of government. The chapter identifies the key poles of the conversion debate, which have remained remarkably uniform through seventy years of legislation, rhetoric, and scholarship. What is at stake for India, as a secular state with constitutional protections for freedom of religion, is how both conversion’s critics and its proponents understand the diversity of motivations for conversion, and how this knowledge is applied to ensure religious freedom for all of India’s citizens. Without understanding these motivations, conversion will remain a contested and at times violently contested issue.
