The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) minister, Rajendra Pal Gautam, recently attended a mass conversion gathering where people took a pledge to “not worship Hindu gods and goddesses.”
Leader of Opposition in the Legislative Council B.K. Hariprasad even tore up a copy of the Bill in protest as the pro-tem chairman Raghunath Rao Malkapure was in the process of putting the Bill to vote.
The Himachal Pradesh Assembly, in line with a few other BJP-ruled states, passed a bill on Saturday forbidding "mass conversion" and raising the maximum punishment to 10 years imprisonment.
The amendment seeks to enhance the punishment and add a specific mention of mass conversion in an existing law that forbids change of religion through force or allurement.