Some images endure, like that of Pontius Pilate washing his hands of guilt before the trial of Jesus Christ. Nothing so world-changing was taking place in the Lok Sabha, however, when the minister of state for home, G. Kishan Reddy, informed the Opposition that the Union government was not planning a Central law against religious conversion for interfaith marriages. So members of the Central government were not seen washing their hands with regard to such laws targeted against interfaith marriages that some Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states have passed. The government had been asked whether it believed that interfaith marriages were leading to forced conversions, if it had evidence of this, and whether it planned a law against it. Exactly a year ago, the government had told Parliament that ‘love jihad’, the conversion of Hindu women ‘lured’ or ‘deceived’ into marriage by men of India’s largest minority community, was not defined by law and no Central agency had found evidence of it. This was much after the BJP, its Hindutva-propagating siblings and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh had drummed up the love jihad myth and interfaith couples were being harassed and punished. So the genie had already been let out of the bottle: this year’s questions came in the context of the ordinance and law against conversion and interfaith marriage recently promulgated in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh respectively — Himachal Pradesh has one too — which are being applied with a distinct bias.

Mr Reddy reiterated the Centre’s declared position, as though legislations violating basic rights of freedom of religion and privacy, together with women’s autonomy, were not being formulated in state after state in spite of absence of evidence. Instead — and here comes the hand-washing — he pointed out that ‘public order’ and ‘police’ were state subjects, hence ‘offences’ related to religious conversion were the business of states and would be addressed by their existent laws. The smooth answer evaded the fact that in the context of UP’s new anti-conversion ordinance, the Allahabad High Court had provided shelter to 125 interfaith couples and said that no one can interfere in the decision of two adults. By appearing faultless in this situation, the Centre is recreating federalism in a new image, in which other BJP-ruled states such as Assam and Haryana can go ahead with anti-interfaith marriage laws too.