Religious Immunity Is Being Abused - The Case for a Religious Accountability and Individual Freedom Act in India

India protects religious freedom. It should.

But freedom of religion cannot mean freedom from accountability.

There is an important distinction between protecting a person’s right to believe something and granting religious institutions exceptional tolerance for harmful conduct. A liberal democracy should vigorously protect the first while refusing the second.

A person should be free to worship Kali, Shiva, Allah, Jesus, the Buddha, a guru, another conception of divinity—or nobody at all. They should also be free to abandon those beliefs tomorrow.

What should not follow from religious freedom is an institutional privilege to coerce, exploit, defraud, threaten, confine, assault or silence people merely because the conduct is presented as spiritual, traditional or sacred.

The governing principle should therefore be simple:

Religious character should neither create an offence nor provide immunity from one.

If conduct would be unlawful in a company, school, household or political organization, calling the same conduct a religious practice should not automatically make it acceptable.

This is the foundation of what Mahakali Tribunal proposes as a Religious Accountability and Individual Freedom Act (RAIFA) for India.

I. Religious Freedom Belongs to People

There is a conceptual mistake at the centre of many debates about religion.

We talk about protecting religions when what constitutional democracy ultimately needs to protect is people.

Religions are systems of beliefs, traditions, institutions and practices. Human beings possess liberty, dignity, bodily autonomy and conscience.

That distinction produces a much stronger conception of religious freedom.

A Hindu must be protected from being forced to abandon Hinduism.

A Muslim must be protected from being forced to abandon Islam.

A Christian must be protected from being forced to abandon Christianity.

An atheist must be protected from being forced into religion.

And the former Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain or member of any other tradition must be equally protected after deciding:

I no longer believe this.

Freedom of religion without freedom from religion is incomplete freedom.

II. The Principle of Equal Accountability

Imagine two institutions.

One operates as an ordinary residential organization. The other calls itself an ashram.

If the first institution unlawfully confines somebody, confiscates identification documents, commits assault or obtains money through legally actionable fraud, the state does not normally ask whether these acts formed part of its philosophy.

Why should attaching supernatural justification fundamentally change the legal analysis?

It should not.

The appropriate principle is:

The same conduct should ordinarily face the same law whether committed in a temple, mosque, church, monastery, ashram, spiritual organization, school, corporation, household or political movement.

This is not hostility toward religion.

It is equality before law.

III. Belief Must Remain Almost Absolutely Free

A Religious Accountability Act must contain powerful safeguards against becoming an anti-religious weapon itself.

The state should not determine whether Krishna exists.

It should not determine whether Jesus performed miracles.

It should not decide whether the Quran is revelation, whether the Vedas possess divine authority, whether reincarnation occurs, whether astrology works metaphysically, or whether somebody genuinely communicates with a deity.

Those questions belong to philosophy, theology, science, historical investigation and individual conscience—not criminal prosecution merely for holding a belief.

People must remain free to believe things other people consider irrational.

They must equally remain free to say:

Your religion is false.

Your scripture is mistaken.

Your god does not exist.

Your guru has no divine authority over me.

I reject this religion.

A free society must be capable of protecting all five statements.

IV. The Right to Religious Exit

India should explicitly recognize a strong statutory Right to Religious Exit.

Every adult should possess an enforceable right to adopt, change, reject or leave religion.

Nobody should be permitted to use violence, credible threats, unlawful confinement, blackmail, deprivation of necessities or comparable unlawful coercion to prevent that decision.

Religious commitments purportedly made for children should not become irrevocable obligations once those children become autonomous adults.

Your parents may give you a religious upbringing.

They cannot own your adult conscience.

V. Create a Religious Coercion Offence

Law should distinguish persuasion from coercion.

A priest telling someone that abandoning religion will have spiritual consequences is expressing theology.

A person threatening physical violence unless someone continues religious observance has crossed into something fundamentally different.

The statute should therefore define prohibited coercive conduct precisely rather than criminalizing unpopular religious teachings.

Relevant conduct could include violence, credible threats, unlawful confinement, blackmail, seizure of essential documents, deliberate deprivation of necessities and other legally defined methods of forcing participation or preventing departure.

This distinction matters.

Persuasion remains protected. Coercion does not.

VI. No Religious Defence for Ordinary Crime

Scripture cannot become a criminal-law exemption.

Neither should divine instruction, tradition, ritual obligation, guru authority or ancestral practice automatically excuse conduct that otherwise satisfies the elements of an offence.

Assault remains assault.

Sexual abuse remains sexual abuse.

Trafficking remains trafficking.

Unlawful confinement remains unlawful confinement.

Financial fraud remains financial fraud.

The law should evaluate what happened—not whether someone attached sacred vocabulary to it.

VII. Protect Children Inside Religious Institutions

Children deserve especially strong protection because they cannot simply walk away from institutions controlled by adults.

Religious residential schools, monasteries, ashrams, seminaries and comparable organizations responsible for children should therefore comply with rigorous safeguarding standards.

These should include appropriate staff screening, accessible reporting systems, independent complaint mechanisms, restrictions on abusive punishment, procedures for suspected sexual abuse and meaningful access to external authorities.

There is no theological doctrine important enough to justify concealing the abuse of a child.

VIII. Spiritual Authority and Sexual Exploitation

Indian law should also examine relationships involving extreme spiritual authority.

A religious leader may be regarded by followers not merely as a teacher but as someone possessing supernatural knowledge, divine authority, control over salvation, karma or spiritual destiny.

That creates unusual possibilities for exploitation.

The legal challenge is to distinguish genuine consensual relationships between adults from circumstances in which dependency, deception, threats or abuse of authority undermine meaningful consent.

The objective should not be policing adult sexuality.

It should be ensuring that spiritual authority does not become a mechanism for sexual exploitation.

IX. Follow the Money

Religious liberty does not require financial opacity.

Large religious and spiritual organizations handling substantial donations should face proportionate accounting and transparency requirements.

Depending on organizational size and legal structure, disclosure could cover audited financial statements, governance structures, related-party transactions, major charitable expenditures and material transfers to connected organizations.

Small community temples, churches, mosques and informal groups should not be buried under disproportionate compliance costs.

The principle should instead be:

The greater the institutional power and financial scale, the greater the expected transparency.

X. Supernatural Claims and Consumer Protection

Law must tread carefully here.

The government should not prosecute someone merely for saying prayer works or blessings bring prosperity.

But commercial representations create different questions.

Suppose someone accepts substantial payment while making objectively testable factual claims—guaranteed medical cures, fabricated credentials, falsified evidence or deliberately deceptive representations designed to obtain money.

The fact that supernatural language accompanies the transaction should not automatically remove ordinary fraud and consumer-protection principles.

The target must be demonstrable deception, not theology.

XI. Whistleblowers Must Be Able to Speak

Closed institutions become especially dangerous when insiders cannot safely report wrongdoing.

Employees, residents, devotees, former members and volunteers who report suspected financial crime, child abuse, sexual exploitation or other unlawful conduct should have meaningful protection against retaliation where they act through appropriate legal mechanisms.

Victims should also have routes to authorities that do not require permission from the religious hierarchy they are accusing.

An institution cannot credibly investigate itself when its leadership is implicated.

XII. Religious Tribunals Cannot Replace Criminal Justice

Religious communities may legitimately maintain internal systems for theological questions.

They may decide who qualifies as clergy.

They may determine ritual rules.

They may determine membership according to lawful organizational procedures.

But an internal religious process cannot replace the criminal justice system.

An allegation of rape does not become merely a spiritual disciplinary matter.

Child abuse cannot be resolved by repentance alone.

Financial crime cannot disappear because money is returned privately.

Where the state has jurisdiction over an alleged crime, religious authorities cannot grant immunity from secular law.

XIII. Protect Religious Critics

Accountability must work in both directions.

India should provide robust protection for peaceful criticism, investigation, scholarship, satire and rejection of religion, consistent with legitimate restrictions concerning threats, incitement and other independently unlawful conduct.

Merely offending someone’s religious feelings should not give anyone a general veto over intellectual inquiry.

A civilization confident in its ideas should permit those ideas to be examined.

Krishna can be questioned.

Muhammad can be historically examined.

Jesus can be criticized.

Hinduism can be criticized.

Islam can be criticized.

Christianity can be criticized.

Atheism can be criticized.

Mahakali Tribunal itself can be criticized.

The answer to an argument should ordinarily be another argument.

XIV. Religious Accountability Must Apply to Everyone

The most important safeguard against weaponization is symmetry.

A Religious Accountability and Individual Freedom Act must apply without sectarian preference.

Hindu institutions.

Muslim institutions.

Christian institutions.

Sikh institutions.

Buddhist institutions.

Jain institutions.

Tribal and indigenous traditions.

New religious movements.

Gurus.

Occult organizations.

Spiritual businesses.

And, where analogous conduct occurs, non-religious ideological organizations as well.

Otherwise religious accountability simply becomes another instrument for one community to persecute another.

XV. The Constitutional Foundation

India does not need to choose between constitutionalism and religious freedom.

Its constitutional structure already recognizes that religious liberty exists within a broader system of rights and legitimate state interests.

Article 25 protects freedom of conscience and the freedom to profess, practise and propagate religion, subject to constitutional limitations including public order, morality and health.

Article 26 protects important freedoms of religious denominations, again subject to public order, morality and health.

Any serious RAIFA proposal would also need careful examination against equality, expression, life and personal-liberty guarantees—including Articles 14, 19 and 21—and against India’s existing criminal, child-protection, trust, charity and consumer-protection legislation.

The objective should therefore not be to abolish Article 25.

It should be to make its underlying concept of freedom of conscience substantially more meaningful.

XVI. A Proposed Religious Accountability Charter

Mahakali Tribunal proposes that future legislation embody several foundational rights and duties:

Freedom to believe.

Freedom not to believe.

Freedom to convert.

Freedom to deconvert.

Freedom to worship.

Freedom to refuse worship.

Freedom to defend religion.

Freedom to criticize religion.

Freedom to investigate religious institutions.

Protection against religious coercion.

Protection against institutional retaliation.

Protection of children irrespective of religious doctrine.

Financial accountability proportionate to institutional scale.

No supernatural justification for independently criminal conduct.

No state prosecution merely for possessing an unpopular theology.

These principles can coexist.

Indeed, they depend upon one another.

XVII. Religious Immunity Is Not Religious Freedom

This distinction deserves to become part of India’s political vocabulary.

Religious freedom protects conscience.

Religious immunity protects institutions from consequences.

They are not the same thing.

A democracy can respect someone’s sacred beliefs without declaring everything done in their name sacred.

It can protect temples while prosecuting crimes committed inside temples.

It can protect mosques while investigating wrongdoing inside mosques.

It can protect churches while holding church authorities accountable.

It can protect ashrams while investigating gurus.

And it can protect atheists and former believers from being forced back into religions they have rejected.

That isn’t the destruction of religion.

It is the destruction of exceptional impunity.

XVIII. The Mahakali Tribunal Principle

Mahakali Tribunal proposes a simple standard for the relationship between religion and the Indian state:

Protect belief. Protect disbelief. Protect worship. Protect exit. Investigate conduct. Punish proven crimes. Never confuse sacred status with legal innocence.

Religion should receive neither collective suspicion nor automatic absolution.

The believer deserves rights.

The dissenter deserves rights.

The child deserves rights.

The victim deserves justice.

The accused deserves due process.

And institutions—religious or otherwise—must remain accountable to law.

India does not need less freedom of religion.

It needs a more complete conception of freedom:

the freedom to enter, the freedom to remain, the freedom to question, and the freedom to leave.

A mature secular democracy should fear neither faith nor criticism of faith.

What it should fear is any institution becoming powerful enough to place itself beyond accountability.