Till August last year, Suleman Pathan was the poster boy of his village in Jamner town of Maharashtra—he was the ideal son to his parents; he headed the committee that organised the village Ganpati celebrations; he would be there for friends and strangers alike in their times of need; and he wanted to join the police force.
But on 11 August, he was allegedly lynched by a mob that consisted some of his closest friends, because they were incensed at his friendship with a minor Hindu girl. They called it ‘love jihad’—an unproven yet popular conspiracy theory among Hindu supremacist groups that insists Muslim men are luring Hindu women into Islam through relationships. They abducted him, stripped him, and assaulted him for over five hours.
Soon after his killing, Hindutva activists hit the streets in Jamner, demanding a law against ‘love jihad’.
The mob asked for a law. Seven months later, the Maharashtra government obliged. On 16 March, the Maharashtra legislature approved the Maharashtra Freedom of Religion Act, 2026, which, ostensibly, seeks to “regulate” religious conversions, but ends up criminalising them. The law ends up snatching the freedom to choose a religion from an individual and hands it over to a mob to decide.
With communal polarisation already on an overdrive in Maharashtra, the law is catastrophic—for empowering the mob even further, while shrinking the space for individual freedoms even more.
From Private Choice to Public Scrutiny
The law mandates those seeking to convert to notify authorities, who are then supposed to publicise this conversion through public notices, and ask for police probes into the “intention, purpose or cause” of the conversion, before allowing the conversion to take place.
The Act also allows anyone related to the person converting—through blood, marriage, or adoption—to lodge a complaint against the conversion. The law even plans for the times that family members don’t wish to object—it empowers police officials to take suo motu cognisance of such conversions and act against them.
In the Maharashtra of today, the law essentially allows the mob to decide who can convert, and who can’t. A 60-day public notice gives enough time for Hindutva mobs to mobilise themselves into action and do whatever it takes to halt the conversion.
There is enough evidence to demonstrate how Hindutva outfits have weaponised a similar, 30-day notice that couples have to file to get married under the Special Marriage Act. Hindutva activists I met in Mumbai last week told me how they had developed extensive networks not just in police stations but also in courts, through which they are able to gather ‘intel’ about interfaith couples looking to get married.
"We also have sleeper cells in various localities, and members of these cells, while never openly a part of our outfit, are always looking out for such couples,” said Omprakash Yadav, 40, the Bajrang Dal’s suraksha pramukh for the Konkan prant, pointing to Hindu women being in relationships with Muslim men. “Once they tip us off about such couples, we start tracking them and then try and get the girl’s parents to intervene so that they don’t elope or get married,” he added.
The law now gives those like Yadav 60 days, instead of 30 days, to be able to object, convince family members, and nudge police officers to halt conversions.
Painting A Target
But it isn’t just the people seeking to convert that the law focuses on. It broadens the ambit of what it considers allurement by someone towards a potential convert: any gift in cash or kind, employment, free education, a promise to marry, but even glorifying one religion vis-à-vis another and criticising one religion over another.
The Bill, dangerously, places the burden to prove the conversion was not illegal on the person who has ‘caused, aided, assisted or abetted’ the conversion. If found guilty of carrying out such conversions, the accused can face a jail term of up to seven years, and a fine ranging from Rs 1-5 lakh.
Critics said such provisions can be used to target Muslims.
“Suppose I have a fallout with one of my employees. He can then turn around and use this law to say, ‘I, as a Muslim, tried to lure him to convert using employment’. Since the law places the burden of proof on the accused, the accuser can make loose allegations—and I will be forced to disprove them."Rais Shaikh, Samajwadi Party legislator from Bhiwandi
Shaikh was one of the few Opposition leaders who spoke out against the Bill when it was tabled in the state legislative Assembly. The principal Opposition party, the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), backed the Bill, while the Congress and Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) presented a feeble opposition to it, with many of its stalwart leaders not speaking on it.
The law even targets those who endorse or attest documents that could be used in the conversion—a provision meant to make it very difficult for people to convert, even if they wish to.
An Environment Of Hate
Even in an ideal world, such provisions could have been prone to gross misuse. And Maharashtra, at this stage, is a communal tinderbox which is seeing a constant, unending Hindutva mobilisation.
The mobilisation has been so thoroughly enmeshed in the everyday, that it barely even makes the news.
Over the last two weeks, Hindutva outfits have been holding free screenings of the controversial new film Kerala Story 2 for Hindu women, and accompanying these screenings are speeches laden with Islamophobia and hate speech that specifically warns them against entering into relationships with Muslim men. These screenings have taken place across the state—with Hindutva outfits proudly posting about it on their social media handles—but one of them showed a whole theatre full of movie-goers pledging an economic and social boycott of Muslims.
Data proves just how communally charged Maharashtra has been over the last few years. In 2023, of the 668 hate speech events where anti-Muslim hate speeches were recorded by the Washington DC-based Center of Study For Organised Hate (CSOH), the biggest chunk—118—were recorded in Maharashtra. In 2024, the number jumped to 210 events in the state, while in 2025, the state saw 193 such events, the CSOH found.
Many of these rallies pushed for a law against ‘love jihad’, with senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders like state Cabinet minister for ports & fisheries Nitesh Rane and legislator Gopichand Padalkar underlining a conspiracy by Muslim men to lure Hindu women into Islam on the pretext of love and marriages. Rane, for instance, said such cases were meant to make India a ‘Muslim Rashtra’; Padalkar, meanwhile, asked Hindu women to even avoid gyms since there was a “big conspiracy” against them by gym trainers belonging to the Muslim community, he said, without naming the community.
On the ground, Hindutva outfits insist that the threat to Hindu women is real—men like Yadav, from the Bajrang Dal, said Muslim men were being “trained and funded“ to “target” Hindu women, and often Muslim men even change names to enter into relationships with Hindu women, which, if true, constitutes deceit.
Instead of addressing such issues, the law gives the mob the power to legislate hate into law. It has used stereotypes and conspiracies to target a personal freedom enshrined in the Constitution, the freedom to profess, practice, and propagate one’s religion.
On record, the Narendra Modi government has denied any cases of ‘love jihad’ under its investigation—and gone on to say that the term has no legal definition in law. In 2023, Maharashtra’s then Minister of Women and Child Development, Mangal Prabhat Lodha, claimed there were over 100,000 such cases of ‘love jihad’ in Maharashtra, but the Maharashtra ‘Interfaith Marriage Family Coordination Committee’ appointed by the state government only got 402 complaints in a year after it was formed.
To be sure, the Maharashtra government has plenty of problems to tackle. It has a debt of Rs 9.32 lakh crore—more than the economies of many smaller Indian states—and so severe is its resource crunch that it is mulling felling its own forests in order to raise funds. Over 3,000 farmers took their own life last year due to the state’s agrarian crises, data from disparate sources show (here and here). Yet, it chooses to expend precious energy on an issue that it cannot prove exists.
But even beyond its misplaced priorities, this new law is a metaphor for the state’s downward spiral and descent into hate and paranoia.
This October will mark 70 years to the date when Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar renounced Hinduism and converted to Buddhism with over 300,000 supporters embracing Buddhism at Nagpur’s Deekshabhoomi.
If that were to happen today, the new law would have forced Ambedkar to take permission from police officials, risk inquiries, and rampaging mobs.
(Kunal Purohit is an award-winning independent journalist, writing on politics, gender, development, inequalities, and the intersections between them. He is an alumnus of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)