by Aiswarya Raj
Nearly seven years after the BJP government in Uttarakhand enacted a law to curb “forced religious conversions”, court records show the statute may be falling short of a basic legal test: evidence. Even as arrests continue, judicial scrutiny has often undercut the state’s claim, with all five cases that have gone to full trial ending in acquittals.
That’s the finding of an investigation by The Indian Express into cases registered under the Uttarakhand Freedom of Religion Act (UFRA), based on records obtained by the newspaper under 30 applications filed under the Right to Information Act.
Until last month, 62 cases were registered by the Uttarakhand Police under the UFRA, passed in 2018 by the BJP government and strengthened further under it. Court records of 51 cases obtained from the state’s 13 districts by The Indian Express show that as of September 2025, only five have gone to full trial. All of them have ended in acquittals; at least seven have been dismissed mid-way largely due to complainants turning hostile, lack of corroboration, and failure by the prosecution to establish coercion or inducement.
In the remaining 39 cases, for which the status is known, the accused are out on bail in three-fourths — 11 having obtained it from the Uttarakhand High Court, and one from the Supreme Court. In three cases, bail has been denied, the hearing is awaited in five, while in two cases, the accused had approached the High Court for a stay on the proceedings and the state has been given time to reply. In many cases, bail was granted, an analysis shows, after noting consensual relationships, contradictory statements, or procedural lapses.
Illustrative of the acquittals is the case related to a wedding arranged by two families, with the couple submitting an affidavit that the woman would not convert to Islam. Despite this, Aman Siddiqui alias Aman Chaudhary spent nearly six months in jail under UFRA before the Supreme Court, on May 19, 2025, granted him bail, holding that the state cannot have any objection to the interfaith marriage which had happened of their own volition and with their parents’ consent.
This story was originally published in indianexpress.com. Read the full story here.
