Debating conscience: propagation, conversion, and the limits of religious liberty in India’s founding moment

This article reinterprets the framing of religious freedom in India’s Constituent Assembly debates by shifting attention from conversion as an object of regulation to conscience as a constitutional category. While scholarship has largely treated conversion as the central problem, this article examines how the scope and limits of conscience were defined and contested at the founding moment. Drawing on the deliberations of the Fundamental Rights and Minorities Sub-Committees, it traces competing efforts to reconcile individual liberty with concerns about social order and hierarchy. These debates produced a framework marked by structured indeterminacy, expressed in the qualifiers “public order”, “morality”, and “health”. The article argues that this settlement is best understood as a textual modus vivendi, in which agreement was secured at the level of constitutional language while underlying disagreements remained unresolved. The resulting model of secularism affirms liberty of conscience in principle but constrains its exercise in practice.