President Droupadi Murmu has given assent to the Maharashtra Freedom of Religion Act, 2026, making it law. The Act prohibits religious conversion through force, allurement, or fraudulent means and mandates prior permission from the district magistrate. Critics argue it infringes Article 25 (freedom of conscience and religion) and Article 21 (personal liberty), while the state defends it as protecting vulnerable individuals from coercive conversion.

India's Constitution protects religious freedom through Article 25, which guarantees every person the right to freely profess, practise, and propagate religion — subject to public order, morality, and health. The key judicial debate around anti-conversion laws turns on two distinctions the Supreme Court drew in Rev. Stainislaus v. State of Madhya Pradesh (1977): the right to propagate religion does not include the right to convert another person, and the state has legislative competence under Entry 1, List II (public order) to regulate conversion by force or fraud.

However, post-Stainislaus jurisprudence has complicated this. In Hadiya case (Shafin Jahan v. Asokan K.M., 2018), the Supreme Court held that the right to choose one's faith and life partner is an expression of individual autonomy protected under Article 21. The court stressed that the state cannot be the arbiter of an adult's personal choices in matters of faith. This creates a direct constitutional tension: anti-conversion laws that require prior government permission before conversion arguably substitute state approval for individual conscience, potentially violating Article 21 as interpreted in Hadiya and Puttaswamy (right to privacy, 2017).

For CLAT PG, the examiner will test whether aspirants can distinguish the Stainislaus right-to-propagate limitation from the Hadiya autonomy-of-choice protection, and apply the correct proportionality analysis to a new fact pattern involving a state anti-conversion statute. The Maharashtra Act's district-magistrate-permission requirement is the most constitutionally contestable provision — it arguably places a prior restraint on a fundamental right, which must satisfy strict scrutiny.