On the afternoon of March 14, in Moga, the stage was set not merely for a political rally but for a new faultline in Punjab’s public life. Wearing a saffron turban—“a symbol of India’s indebtedness to the Sikh Gurus”, as he put it—Union Home Minister Amit Shah addressed the “Badlav (change) Rally” with a familiar cadence of urgency and resolve.

Then came the line that cut through the applause: if the BJP formed the next government in Punjab, its first legislative move would be a law to ban religious conversions.

The statement sat within a broader narrative of drugs, debt, corruption, and a breakdown of law and order under the AAP government. In Shah’s framing, conversion was not a matter of personal faith but a marker of decline. Punjab, he said, was “shrouded with loans, drugs, conversion, corruption, and the terror of gangsters”. With that, a long-simmering social undercurrent entered the centre of electoral politics ahead of the 2027 Assembly election.

After securing nearly 19 per cent of the vote in the 2024 general election, the BJP is trying to expand its footprint in a State where it has remained marginal. Conversion, in this context, serves as a hinge issue—one that touches religious identity, caste anxieties, and political mobilisation at once.

Punjab, India’s only Sikh-majority State, has in recent years seen sporadic tensions between sections of dominant-caste Sikhs and local Christian communities. Several Sikh and Hindu organisations have run ghar wapsi (reconversion) drives. The Vishva Hindu Parishad and the Dharam Jagran Manch—both affiliates of the RSS—have held such events in which Christian families, many from the Mazhabi Sikh community, were “reconverted”. The SGPC has conducted similar drives.

Since 2017, several BJP-ruled States have passed or strengthened anti-conversion laws, often citing concerns over coercion, demographic change, and interfaith marriages. In Punjab, however, the issue carries a distinct social and historical weight. “Conversions have emerged as a big issue in the State and have been a source of constant social anxiety over fears of demographic change, especially among the Sikhs. From the point of view of electoral politics, it is a smart move by the BJP,” said Ashutosh Kumar, professor of political science at Panjab University.

According to Census 2011, Christians make up just 1.26 per cent of Punjab’s population—around 3.5 lakh people—a figure that complicates claims of large-scale demographic change. Yet Shah’s promise drew sharp reactions. Congress leader Raj Kumar Verka questioned the intent, asking why the Centre did not bring a national law if the concern was genuine. Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann accused the BJP of using religion for electoral gain, calling it “the only party that seeks votes in the name of religion”. Mann also raised the issue of gangster Lawrence Bishnoi, alleging that the Centre had given him “VIP treatment” in Gujarat’s Sabarmati Jail while blaming Punjab for organised crime.

Christian organisations in Punjab called Shah’s proposal politically motivated, warning that treating conversion as a threat risked stigmatising marginal communities while drawing attention away from caste inequality and rural distress. Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) leaders, who have opposed forced conversions, said any such law would need strong safeguards. They also asked why the BJP tied the issue to the next Assembly election. In the past, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) and the Akal Takht have demanded anti-conversion laws in Punjab.

Amid the political contestation, political commentator and author Jagtar Singh offered a different frame. “There are no large-scale forcible conversions in Punjab; the more relevant question is why people are leaving their existing faiths,” Singh said. “Sikh society is caste-based, just like Hindu society—casteless in philosophy, but not always in reality.” Despite Sikhism’s foundational rejection of caste, social hierarchies persist in practice. This tension between doctrine and lived experience forms the backdrop against which the conversion debate unfolds.

The question is not new. Nearly a century ago, Bhagat Singh addressed it directly. In an article titled “The Question of the Untouchables”, published under the pseudonym “Vidrohi” in the June 1928 issue of Kirti, he argued that the real issue was not why people changed faiths but why they were denied dignity within them. India’s religious communities—Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh alike—were less concerned with ending caste oppression, he wrote, than with drawing the oppressed into their own folds. In India, the most prominent modern precedent for conversion as social protest remains B.R. Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism in 1956—an act understood as a rejection of caste oppression rather than a purely theological shift.

The crypto-Christian

According to Kumar, a subtle shift has been underway, particularly in the Majha region. “Many Scheduled Caste families attend gurdwaras in public while secretly worshipping Christ in villages. They are called crypto-Christians,” he said. Kumar traced the term to the historian Stavro Skendi, who used it in a 1967 study of Christians in the Ottoman Empire who outwardly adopted Islam to avoid persecution while privately keeping their faith. “Crypto-Christianity is a type of covert religion that is based on survival rather than shame,” Kumar said.

Kumar placed the fear of conversions within Punjab’s traumatic modern history. “The fears around demographic change are rooted in Partition, Operation Blue Star, and the anti-Sikh violence following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi,” he said. “Punjab is the only Sikh-majority State, whereas Sikhs are a microscopic minority in the rest of the country. So the fear is natural that they may get reduced to a minority in their own State.” The growth of Deras, he added, has fed these fears further.

Two competing narratives run through this discourse. The first—common in sections of the media and in political rhetoric—treats conversion as organised and externally driven, powered by networks of pastors, global missionary organisations, and digital evangelism. Critics say miracle-healing narratives, WhatsApp prayer groups, and large charismatic gatherings prey on poverty and social vulnerability.

The second narrative, grounded in sociological research, places conversion within a longer historical arc. Kulbir Kaur’s work, “Searching for a New Identity: Christianity, Conversion and Dalit Sikhs”, traces Punjab’s Christian communities to colonial-era mass movements among Dalit groups, recording widespread exclusion—denial of entry into gurdwaras, segregated habitation, and deep-rooted marginalisation. For many, conversion was not something imposed on them. It was an exit—a search for dignity within an alternative social order.

The emergence of turbaned Christians—people who keep Sikh markers such as the turban while practising Christianity—has added another layer of anxiety for Sikh religious institutions. The SGPC and the Akal Takht have responded with edicts, awareness campaigns, and, at times, social boycotts.

The hidden cost of a dual identity

In villages across Majha and Doaba, this duality plays out quietly: families attend the gurdwara in the morning and join Christian prayer meetings at night, their homes displaying pictures of both Jesus Christ and Sikh Gurus—parallel religious worlds within the same household.

Niyati Sharma, a PhD researcher at Panjab University’s Department of Political Science who studies crypto-Christianity in Punjab, offers the most detailed account of this phenomenon. Conversions, she noted, are concentrated among Dalit communities—who make up nearly 32 per cent of Punjab’s population and remain largely landless in rural areas. But conversion rarely means a clean break. Under the 1950 Presidential Order, Scheduled Caste status—and the reservations and welfare benefits tied to it—is restricted to those professing Hinduism, Sikhism, or Buddhism.

Many converts, as a result, hide their faith. “Scheduled Caste families who convert often conceal it to avoid losing constitutional protections,” Sharma said. “Many converts thus continue to have two identities: on official documents, they identify as Sikhs or Hindus; in private, they live as Christians.”

Dalit attraction to Christianity, she argued, cannot be reduced to inducement or coercion; it must be understood as a search for dignity. Missionary institutions—churches, schools, hospitals—offered forms of inclusion that were often denied elsewhere. Archival evidence suggests that by the early 20th century, a large majority of rural Christian converts in Punjab came from Scheduled Caste backgrounds—a pattern that broadly persists.

Yet conversion does not dissolve caste. “Caste is assumed to end with conversion in this legal system. However, caste actually outlasts religion in society,” Sharma said. “Dalit Christians continue to experience limited mobility, poverty, and social exclusion.”

The result, according to observers, is a kind of social limbo. Converts drift from their original communities but are not fully taken in by institutional Christian networks. In practice, this can mean exclusion from both State welfare schemes for Scheduled Castes and targeted benefits for Christian minorities. Many are forced to “lead a life of deceit”, Sharma said, managing identity across bureaucratic and social lines.

Community friction has its own calendar. “When Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus across Punjab, the Sikhs observe Shahidi Divas, which honours the supreme sacrifices of the Sikh Gurus and their families—primarily the martyrdom of Guru Tegh Bahadur and the younger sons of Guru Gobind Singh,” Sharma said.

Law, Constitution, and contradiction

The proposal for an anti-conversion law raises difficult constitutional questions. Civil liberties groups say laws regulating conversion often blur the line between coercion and voluntary choice, opening the door to misuse.

There is also a historical irony. At his rally, Shah invoked Guru Tegh Bahadur—revered as Hind Di Chadar, the Shield of India—as a defender of religious freedom. The ninth Sikh Guru was beheaded at Chandni Chowk in Delhi on the orders of Aurangzeb, the sixth Mughal emperor, in November 1675. Yet the proposed legislation seeks to regulate religious transition. Sikh history is itself built on the defence of an individual’s right to belief, including the right to change one’s faith.

On the legal front, the Supreme Court on March 24, 2026, reaffirmed that Scheduled Caste status is restricted to adherents of Hinduism, Sikhism, or Buddhism, in the case of Chinthada Anand v. State of Andhra Pradesh. The ruling leaves Dalit Christians and Muslims outside the framework of reservation despite the persistence of caste-based disadvantage.

Commenting on the ruling, Professor Emanual Nahar, former Chairperson of the Punjab State Commission for Minorities, told Frontline that the court should also weigh the socio-economic realities. “The apex court should take into account the Ranganath Misra and Sachar Committee reports, both of which recommended extending reservation benefits to Dalit Christians and Muslims,” he said. The Union government has acknowledged this gap. In October 2022, it appointed a commission headed by former Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan to study the socio-economic conditions of Dalit converts; the commission’s latest deadline was April 10, 2026.

Both Nahar and Niyati Sharma framed the contradiction in constitutional terms: “By associating caste-based affirmative policies with religion, the 1950 Order undercuts both. India’s constitutional promise of secularism means nothing if faith becomes a barrier to justice.” Article 15 forbids discrimination based on caste or religion, while Article 25 guarantees the right to profess, practise, and propagate religion.

According to Sharma, Christian conversions in Punjab are part of a longer continuum—stretching from colonial-era social movements to contemporary shifts shaped by socio-economic and technological factors. People in Punjab moved from Hinduism to Sikhism because Sikhism offered an escape from caste oppression, she said. What has changed today is not the reason for conversion but its visibility, and the way it is used politically.

An anti-conversion law may curb certain practices. It may address specific cases of coercion. It may also serve electoral ends. But it cannot answer the question at the heart of both the scholarship and the lived experience: why do people convert? Until Punjab confronts the persistence of caste hierarchies, rural marginalisation, and institutional exclusion, the phenomenon is unlikely to recede.

The promise of badlav (change) has long been a refrain in the State’s politics. But change, here, cannot be legislated into existence. “Being a crypto-Christian is not about losing,” Niyati Sharma said. “It has to do with being resilient… maintaining dignity while adjusting to injustice.”

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