Article 25 of the Constitution of India

The article opens with an unusually wide guarantee. Subject to public order, morality and health and to the other provisions of this part, all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion. All persons, not all citizens, so it reaches foreign nationals. And the right to propagate, which was contested in the Constituent Assembly and which distinguishes the Indian text from several of its models.

The qualifications matter as much as the grant. The second clause preserves the operation of any existing law and the making of any new one on two grounds. The first is regulating or restricting any economic, financial, political or other secular activity which may be associated with religious practice. The second is providing for social welfare and reform, or throwing open Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all classes and sections of Hindus.

That second head is the constitutional descendant of the temple entry movement. The proclamation issued in Travancore in 1936 and the Madras statute of 1947 had already done the work in two jurisdictions; the constitution generalised the power.

The distinction between the religious and the secular in the first head has generated the largest body of Indian religion jurisprudence, because it obliges courts to decide what is an essential religious practice and therefore protected, and what is a secular activity associated with religion and therefore regulable.

Two explanations are attached to the second clause and they have had very different afterlives.

Explanation I provides that the wearing and carrying of kirpans shall be deemed to be included in the profession of the Sikh religion. It settles a practical question that most jurisdictions have had to answer some other way, and it is cited in comparative argument elsewhere for that reason.

Explanation II provides that the reference to Hindus in the clause about throwing open religious institutions shall be construed as including a reference to persons professing the Sikh, Jaina or Buddhist religion, and that references to Hindu religious institutions shall be construed accordingly. Its purpose in 1950 was to extend the temple entry power to the institutions of those traditions, so that caste exclusion could be reached wherever it operated.

The objection is that the drafting absorbs three traditions into a fourth. Sikh members of the Constituent Assembly objected at the time, and Sikh, Jain and Buddhist bodies have objected since, on the ground that a constitution which elsewhere names them as distinct religions here treats them as sections of Hinduism, and that the same construction runs through Indian personal law, where the Hindu Marriage Act and its companions apply to Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists by the same device.

The explanation has not been amended. The atlas records the provision and the objection, and does not resolve a question of constitutional interpretation.