Fear of persecution among Indian Christians has led churches in Maharashtra to ask worshippers to sign consent forms declaring that they attend services of their own free will, as this western state becomes the 13th Indian state with an “anti-conversion” statute.
About 4,000 churches in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region have adopted the practice, The Straits Times reported.
The forms are kept at church offices and can be shown to police or government authorities if requested, Pastor Sam Mathai, of Vasai in neighboring Palghar district, according to Rediff.
Some Protestant and evangelical groups introduced the forms ahead of enforcement of Maharashtra’s 2026 Freedom of Religion Act, which took effect Friday, UCA News reported.
Every person planning to attend a service must state they are attending purely by personal choice, free of any pressure, Devdan Tribhuvan, who heads the Maharashtra Christian Development Association as its president, was quoted as saying. He said the declaration guards against false claims that a conversion was forced or achieved through fraud.
The statute took force following presidential assent and a gazette notification on July 30.
The law targets religious conversion achieved through marriage, undue influence, allurement, fraud or coercion, and authorities may jail repeat offenders for as long as a decade. Anyone intending to change faith must also notify a district magistrate 60 days beforehand, and violating that procedure can bring up to seven years in prison.
Christians have warned the statute could be misused to accuse Christians of running conversion drives disguised as prayer meetings.
Mathai said 11 attacks had struck churches in the region over the past six months, in Nalasopara, Bhayander, Palghar and Vasai-Virar areas in particular, with Hindu nationalist groups entering unannounced and beating people.
That prompted pastors and community leaders to seek a response, he said, adding that nobody is compelled to attend.
Dolphy D’Souza, the Bombay Catholic Sabha’s spokesperson, said the forms are “the least safety measure we can take to protect us from legal proceedings” if pastors or churches face accusations of forcible conversion. He said disruptions of prayer services had prompted some churches to also install closed-circuit cameras to identify attackers.
Nigel Barrett, a priest from the Archdiocese of Bombay, called the self-declaration a wise precaution given the potential for the law’s misuse, though he said he regretted that Christians must declare they pray by choice.
Manoj Kumar Sharma, the joint police commissioner for law and order, was quoted as saying that Mumbai had stayed largely peaceful apart from a handful of incidents targeting Christians, and that officers had cautioned anyone found disrupting services.
Twenty religious, civil society and women’s rights groups opposed the law at an Aug. 24 news conference in Mumbai, calling it “an intrusive regulation of personal choices” that infringes on the right to freely practice and spread one’s faith, and that puts the burden of proof on the accused.
D’Souza said, “Fraudulent or coercive religious conversions are already punishable under Indian criminal codes,” adding that such statutes function as a political tool letting Hindu majoritarian groups target religious minorities.
The All India Catholic Union’s spokesperson, John Dayal, said these statutes exist to build the Hindu majority into a lasting vote bank rather than to stop conversion, and called Maharashtra’s version among the harshest.
Similar statutes are already in place in a dozen of India’s 28 states, most run by governments from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, and church groups have taken their constitutionality to the Supreme Court.
Christians form 2.3 percent of India's 1.4 billion people nationally and 0.96 percent, or just over 1 million, of Maharashtra’s 129.5 million residents, with the Bombay Archdiocese alone counting half a million Catholics.
Anti-conversion laws have existed in Indian states going back to the 1980s, but enforcement has hardened and spread over the last decade amid electoral gains by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party.
In the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, which passed its own version in 2020, legal aid groups count roughly 200 pending cases against Christians, and more than 800 individuals, pastors and worshippers among them, have been arrested or detained.
Since March 2026, India’s government has also pursued a change to the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act letting it seize nonprofit assets once foreign-funding licenses lapse. Of 52,000 registered charities nationwide, more than 22,400 have already lost such licenses, and Christian-run charities were among the first to object. U.S. lawmakers, including Rep. Riley Moore and Sen. James Risch, have criticized the proposed amendment.
