A Law in Search of a Problem: Why Goa Pulled Back on the Anti-Conversion Bill

Christian churches believe the Bill has been parked, not scrapped, writes John Dayal

Goa had come within hours of becoming the 14th state with an anti-conversion law on its statute book and possibly among the harshest in the country.

(Photo: The Quint)

Senior advocate Cleofato Almeida Coutinho asked why Goa, a state with no cases of forced conversion, needed a strident anti-conversion law. He suggested that Goa needed an anti-superstition statute instead.

Prabhakar Timble, educationist and former State Election Commissioner, warned that an anti-conversion law would create nurseries for self-appointed enforcers rather than solve any social problem, and Uday Bhembre, who has spent a lifetime participating in Goan public debate, pointed out to everyone that the Constitution already guarantees the right to change one’s religion.

But it was not these sane and mature voices that made Chief Minister Pramod Sawant, who had chaired the 26 August Cabinet meeting which cleared the Goa Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Bill, 2026, then five days later, minutes before the monsoon session of the Legislative Assembly opened, remove it from the Business List.

Goa had come within hours of becoming the 14th state with an anti-conversion law on its statute book and possibly among the harshest in the country.

This law is a key political objective of the party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The Narendra Modi government has encouraged every Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in the states to enact this law because it does not have the parliamentary strength to bring in a national legislation which would require a Constitutional amendment.

The Electoral Arithmetic Behind The Retreat

Chief Minister Sawant blinked because key BJP leaders in the state had told him and the Prime Minister’s Office that the party would be badly hit in the coming elections, and the state exchequer would suffer irreparable injury if tourist-hungry Goa came to be known as intolerant and inhospitable to Christians.

Hinduism is the majority religion of Goa at roughly 66 percent to 67 percent, Christians make up about 25 percent, while Muslims account for about 8 percent to 8.3 percent of the population. Christians are distributed unevenly across the state's two districts, with South Goa registering about 36 percent and North Goa about 16.4 percent.

Goa is also perhaps the only state with a sizeable number of Christian MLAs on the government benches, and a very vocal civil society, and with between seven and 12 Catholic legislators supporting Sawant reportedly making their position clear before the session began, it was the arithmetic of a 40-member Assembly that made the Chief Minister, the state party president, and the national BJP leadership collectively retreat.

Michael Lobo, who represents Calangute, said the Cabinet had acted in haste, the Bill required further study, everyone’s views needed to be considered, and matters were moving in the wrong direction. Delilah Lobo of Siolim confirmed that the government had agreed not to introduce it.

Aleixo Reginaldo Lourenco, the Curtorim Independent who has sustained this government through some of its more difficult moments, made the sharpest point. The state’s own data, he said, showed no instances of forced conversion in Goa. He would, therefore, oppose the Bill on the floor unless it was first referred to a Select Committee. Antonio Vas of Cortalim had called for its outright withdrawal several days earlier.

The Catholic Church and the Christian community reacted first with disbelief, and then with anger, with the Council for Social Justice and Peace and the Catholic Association of Goa, affiliated to the 107-year-old All India Catholic Union, issuing a joint statement on 27 August that the Bill risked replacing mutual trust with suspicion and social harmony with surveillance.

Responding to questions from Yuri Alemao and, later, Carlos Ferreira, the Chief Minister told the Assembly that two conversion cases had been registered in 2022 and two more in 2023. That amounts to four cases in 14 years in a state of approximately 15.9 lakh people.

The FIRs against Dominic D’Souza and Joan Mascarenhas were quashed by the Goa Bench of the Bombay High Court after Mapusa police filed a final summary conceding that, despite what the investigating officer described as considerable effort, no specific evidence had emerged against the accused. A third case was closed by the police themselves.

A Law In Search Of A Problem

This was the data on which the government intended to erect a statute providing, in some circumstances, for imprisonment extending to the end of a person’s life; a minimum fine of Rs 50,000; compensation of up to Rs 5 lakh; and imprisonment of between three and ten years for any priest, maulvi or “karmakandi” involved.

The Bill also required 60 days’ notice to the authorities before a conversion, during which relatives and third parties could file objections.

The provision of making marriages void where a court concluded that conversion had been their purpose is very popular with BJP governments, each of which has introduced it in existing or new laws, specifically directed against the tiny Muslim population, and visitors.

Writing in the Sangh’s own weekly two days before the withdrawal, an advocate of the Bill relied not on conversion cases in Goa but on the increase in the Muslim share of the population, from 1.95 percent in 1960 to 8.33 percent in 2011, and on disputes in Kerala concerning Waqf land and interfaith marriage.

This was a shameful admission that the government, with all the BJP and RSS cadres at its command, apart from the intelligence network of the police with a tiny population to watch could not find a Goan Christian to accuse and instead had to evoke the Sangh’s demographic anxiety to justify its actions.

The Christian share of Goa’s population fell from 38.07 percent at the last Portuguese census to 25.10 percent in 2011. The absolute number of Christians barely changed in the decade to 2011, rising from 359,568 to 366,130, while the state’s total population continued to grow.

In Salcete, the Christian heartland, Christians constituted three-quarters of the taluka’s population in 1961. Their proportion has since steadily declined because of in-migration and departure. In Mormugao, the Christian share collapsed from 54 percent to 22 percent. Whatever is reshaping Goa’s religious composition, it is not conversion to Christianity.

Goa's Real Demographic Anxiety

While the government prepared to require 60 days’ notice from a Goan wishing to change faith, Goans have been changing their nationality in tens of thousands, without ceremony. Sawant told the Assembly that 25,939 people had surrendered Indian passports in Goa during the decade ending in March 2024. Official estimates place the figure at 26,612 between 2015 and 2025, following 11,500 during the five years ending in 2013.

The Portuguese consulate in Panaji has 15,655 registered electors, compared with 349 at the embassy in Delhi, and an estimated 8,000 Goans live in the Wiltshire city of Swindon alone. The state’s demographic crisis is one of emigration and dispossession, of land conversions under Section 39-A, and of an economy that offers educated young people little they want.

The electoral map explains the real issue with clarity—24 of Goa’s 40 Assembly constituencies lie within the four Old Conquest talukas of Salcete, Bardez, Tiswadi, and Mormugao. Excluding the four urban seats of Margao, Mormugao, Panaji, and Mapusa, the remaining 20 have Christian populations ranging from 40 to 90 percent.

According to estimates by the BJP’s own organisers, Salcete’s eight constituencies are approximately 85 percent Catholic and have never, in three decades, been friendly territory for the party. In 2024, the Congress won South Goa by 61,000 votes against a candidate as well-resourced as Pallavi Dempo. Calangute and Siolim belong to the Lobos, Santa Cruz to Rodolfo Fernandes, Aldona to Carlos Ferreira, and Panaji and Taleigao to the Monserrate family.

The Wider Anti-Conversion Template

The template of these anti-conversion laws, though loosely based on the first one enacted in Orissa in 1967, appears to have been worked out as far back as 2014 in the RSS headquarters in Nagpur or New Delhi, with each draft fine-tuned for the circumstances of the state where it was meant to apply, and then enacted. By now, the tally is 13, with as many as eight states enacting the legislation after 2014, including Uttar Pradesh.

The doctrinal position remains where the Supreme Court left it in 1977 in Rev Stainislaus: the right to propagate religion under Article 25 does not include the right to convert another person, but the newer statutes go far beyond that holding, requiring prior notice to a district magistrate, burden of proof onto the convert, and criminalising the pastor or alluvia.

Petitions challenging these laws have been pending since 2020, led by Citizens for Justice and Peace and joined by the National Council of Churches in India and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India. The Court issued notice to the Union and to 12 states in February this year.

The asymmetry at the centre of these statutes remains both unaddressed and unembarrassed. No government of this party, at the Centre or in any state, has criminalised reconversion to Hinduism, although “Ghar Wapsi” deploys precisely the promises of caste status, reservation and employment that the statutes define as "allurement."

It is clear, as civil society often says, that these laws do not prohibit conversion; they prohibit one direction of religious travel.

Goa’s place in this story contains a further irony, as its Portuguese-era Civil Code of 1867 is repeatedly cited from national platforms as evidence that a uniform civil code is workable in India. Uttarakhand, Gujarat and Assam have legislated their own versions on that argument. 

Christian churches believe the Bill has been parked, not scrapped, as nothing in the Chief Minister’s conduct suggests that he has abandoned it. Moreover, the assurance given on 31 August extended only to a three-day session.

The Bill will probably return after 2027, when the electoral arithmetic may no longer require the support of seven Catholic legislators. A Bill withdrawn for want of votes is not a Bill defeated, and the next Assembly may supply what this one would not.

(The author is a writer and activist. He is the former President of the 102-year-old All India Catholic Union. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)