New Delhi: The Adityanath-led Bharatiya Janata Party government in Uttar Pradesh has strongly defended the right of its police force to lodge first information reports under the state’s controversial anti-conversion law even when the law, on the face of it, only allows victims of illegal conversion or their close relatives to file such complaints.

According to an affidavit submitted by the state government in the Allahabad High Court on September 10 in an ongoing legal case – a copy of which is with The Wire – the Adityanath government has argued that its police officers do indeed qualify as “aggrieved” persons in cases of unlawful conversion.

The government has justified the rampant lodging of suo motu FIRs by the police against unlawful conversion by arguing that it was in the interest of law and order and that the powers granted to a police officer under the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) were not controlled by the section of the UP unlawful conversion law dealing with competency in getting FIRs lodged.

Can the police lodge FIRs against unlawful conversion on their own without any complainant?

Can the police be an “aggrieved person” under the state’s anti-conversion law?

The Durga Yadav case

These questions have come up after a pastor from Jaunpur, Durga Yadav, who was last year booked under the anti-conversion law for trying to allegedly convert poor Hindus to Christianity, challenged the legality of the FIR, saying that the police had no legal authority to lodge the complaint against him.

In the FIR, the police accused Yadav of running a prayer service to illegally convert “gullible” people to Christianity. The complainant in the case, however, was not any of those people who were unlawfully converted through allurements or coercion or misrepresentation, but the station house officer of Kerakat police station in Jaunpur, Ram Janam Yadav.

The Durga Yadav case, which is ongoing in the HC, has given rise to the larger question, if the police or any-other third party entity, are legally authorised to be the complainant against unlawful conversion. At this juncture, it’s important to note that the state government recently amended the existing anti-conversion law and made it more stringent. Among the amendments made by the government was to alter Section 4 of The UP Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021.

Section 4 of the 2021 Act says that “any aggrieved person, his or her parents, brother, sister or any other person related to him or her by blood, marriage or adoption” would be considered competent to lodge an FIR under the law.

However, under the newly-amended law, notified on August 6, 2024 – the UP Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion (Amendment) Act, 2024 – ”any person” would be authorised to lodge a complaint against unlawful conversion. The question raised in the Durga Yadav writ petition case would still remain valid to the FIRs lodged prior to the notification in August 2024, before the law was amended.

Durga Yadav filed a writ petition in the HC submitting that the FIR lodged against him under Section 3 and 5(1) of the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of........

© The Wire