The Maharashtra Assembly passed a sweeping anti-conversion law on March 16, criminalising religious conversions deemed to involve a “promise of marriage” and handing police the power to act against interfaith couples on their own initiative. This was not a knee-jerk reaction. It was a culmination of a three-year campaign by Hindutva groups and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLAs that combined ground-level pressure, hate rallies and a deliberate deception of law enforcement, according to an investigation by Article 14.
Among those celebrating the law’s passage is Omprakash Yadav, 40, a Bajrang Dal activist and school teacher from Ghatkopar in eastern Mumbai, who, for the last three years, has spent his afternoons (once his classes are done) filing into police stations across the city, pressing officers to register complaints against Muslim men in relationships with Hindu women.
The police, though, refused to cooperate. “Most times, they wouldn’t budge and say they can’t break up two consenting adults,” Yadav told Article 14. His workaround, on at least one occasion, was to convince a woman’s family to lodge a theft complaint against her instead. This worked. The couple was traced, and the woman was “counselled” out of the relationship, he said.
Each week, Yadav’s group would also assemble in Ghatkopar to pool all the information they have. These included tips from informants spread across localities, social media posts flagging interfaith relationships and updates on cases they were already pursuing.
For these men, fighting “love jihad,” the unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that Muslim men court Hindu women in a calculated bid to convert them to Islam, was a full-time operation running alongside their day jobs.
They believe the new anti-conversion law changes their position entirely.
The Maharashtra Freedom of Religion Act, 2026, prescribes up to seven years in prison and fines of up to Rs 5 lakh for conversions “allurement, coercion, force, misrepresentation or promise of marriage.” Couples planning an interfaith marriage involving a conversion must give 60 days’ prior notice to authorities, submit to possible police inquiry and file a post-conversion declaration within three weeks. Failing to do so renders the conversion void.
Crucially, unlike similar laws passed by other states, Maharashtra’s law grants police the power to initiate suo motu action against conversions they suspect violate its provisions, a clause that activists say makes it a tool available for precisely the kind of harassment Yadav and his network have spent years trying to formalise.
In March, 35 civil society organisations came together publicly to oppose the law, warning that it erodes women’s autonomy over personal and religious choices and encroaches on constitutionally guaranteed freedoms to practice, propagate and change one’s faith.
“The government has not even told us what the necessity of the law is. Are there any forced conversions taking place?” Lara Jesani, a lawyer with the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), Maharashtra, told Article 14. “Where is the data for it?” she asked.
In 2023, the state’s then women and child development minister Mangal Prabhat Lodha claimed before the Assembly that there were over 100,000 “love jihad” cases in Maharashtra. However, a right to information (RTI) filed by Samajwadi Party MLA Rais Shaikh revealed that the government’s own Interfaith Marriage Family Coordination Committee, which was set up specifically to probe such cases, had received just 402 complaints in an entire year.
The anti-conversion law is the product of a sustained, organised campaign that began taking shape in late 2022, when two things coincided – the BJP returned to power in Maharashtra in alliance with the Eknath Shinde faction of Shiv Sena and the killing of Shraddha Walkar by her partner Aaftab Poonawala gripped the country.
Walkar was Hindu and Poonawala was Muslim. The crime was brutal. Poonawala had murdered, dismembered, and over weeks disposed of Walker’s remains. Members of the Hindutva groups told Article 14 that they received instructions “from the very top” to organise protests around the case.
Yadav alone held five such protests in Ghatkopar.
By January 2023, the street-level protests had given way to something far larger. Tens of thousands gathered at Mumbai’s historic Shivaji Park, draped in saffron, carrying banners that read, “Abdul ho ya Aftab, sab ne padhi hai ek kitaab (Be it Abdul or Aftab, they have all read the same book.” The stage had a banner saying “Love Jihad Land Jihad-Mukt Mumbai.”
The main speaker that evening was Telangana BJP legislator T Raja Singh, who warned that Hindu anger could erupt “like a volcano” if the government did not act, and used a derogatory slur for Muslims from the same stage. Singh left the BJP in May 2025.
More consequential to the law’s eventual passage was Nitesh Rane, a three-time BJP MLA who addressed rally after rally across the state, alleging a global Islamic conspiracy to “finish off” Hindu women and urging Hindus to act against Muslims “without worrying about the consequences.”
Courts ordered police to file first information reports (FIR) against him for hate speech. As many as 19 cases were registered over three years but none has reached trial.
In December 2024, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis brought Rane into his Cabinet as Minister of Fisheries and Ports. The following month, Rane told Article 14 that “a million girls” were trapped by love jihad, with “unregistered cases in lakhs” in Maharashtra alone, and that a law was being drafted.
“We will bring in a law against religious conversions,” he said, adding, “It is something we have promised in our manifesto.”
Fourteen months later, the anti-conversion bill was passed.
In Malad, a northwestern Mumbai suburb, a Bajrang Dal activist, who did not want to be named, told Article 14 that the 2023 film “The Kerala Story,” which depicted Muslim men allegedly luring Hindu women into ISIS networks – a narrative widely believed to be fabricated – had significantly expanded public reporting to groups like his.
He organised free screenings for Hindu women. Similar screenings were held for a sequel earlier this year. “Since then, Hindu men and women started coming forward and reporting any such Hindu-Muslim relationships they saw around them,” he said.
To mark Ramnavami this year, his group built a tableau for their procession through the Malvani area, a neighbourhood with a history of communal violence. The tableau featured a fridge with a dismembered woman’s body inside, with blood dripping from it. This was clearly a reference to the Walkar killing.”This is to show where women will end up in pieces,” the activist said, “if they trust Muslim men.”
This post was last modified on April 2, 2026 6:15 pm