By Nidah Kaiser And Sabah Gurmat
New Delhi: Life imprisonment. Seizure and demolition of property. Cancellation of institutional registrations.
These are some of the unprecedented punishments proposed under India’s most draconian anti-conversion law, the Rajasthan Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Bill, 2025, passed in September 2025 by that state’s legislative assembly and formally written into law after the governor’s assent on 8 October 2025.
With the passage of this law, Rajasthan is the 12th state in India to promulgate legal measures to curb so-called forced religious conversions, nine of them governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The Rajasthan law effectively legalises the trend of arbitrary bulldozer demolitions that especially target the properties of religious minorities—a phenomenon Article 14 first documented in 2022 as collective illegal punishment.
What was once seen as an extrajudicial model of punishment, now has legal sanction.
Evidence from Rajasthan—where 9.07% of the population is Muslim and 0.14% Christian, according to 2011 Census data, the latest available—suggests that harassment and attacks against Christians surged when the bill reached the state assembly in September 2025.
Violence In Advance
Scattered raids and police warnings against Christian prayer meetings morphed into an organised harassment campaign repackaged as “anti-conversion vigilance”, Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), an advocacy group, reported on 7 October 2025.
“This was not a coincidence,” said the CJP report. “In several districts, including Alwar, Dungarpur, and Jaipur, the people abusing Christians worked with police and other authorities, a relationship that demonstrated their collusion.”
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here.
