Noori v. State of U.P.: the anti-conversion law and interfaith liberty

The facts in brief

Twelve interfaith couples, every one of them comprising adults in a voluntary relationship, approached the Allahabad High Court complaining of threats and harassment from family members opposed to their unions. Seven of the petitions involved Muslim women with Hindu men; five involved Hindu women with Muslim men. None of the couples had carried out a religious conversion. What they sought was straightforward — protection of their life and liberty against private threats — and what they encountered was the argument that interfaith cohabitation itself fell foul of the State's anti-conversion statute.

The lead matter, Noori & Anr. v. State of U.P. & 4 Ors., gave its name to the consolidated batch. The respondents — the State and certain private parties — resisted on the footing that the 2021 Act was engaged the moment partners of different religions chose to live together. Justice Vivek Kumar Singh, sitting as a Single Judge, was therefore required to decide a question that recurs constantly before the Allahabad and Lucknow benches: does the anti-conversion law bite merely because two people profess different faiths?

The constitutional question

The narrow statutory question was whether the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act 2021 is attracted to an interfaith relationship or marriage in which no conversion has taken place. The broader constitutional question was whether interference with such a relationship — by family, by community, or by the State invoking the Act — is consistent with Article 21.

The two questions are linked. If the Act is read as covering interfaith unions per se, it would operate as a licence for the State to scrutinise, and for families to obstruct, the most intimate of personal choices. If it is read as a conversion statute — concerned only with conversions secured by prohibited means — then an interfaith couple who have not converted stand entirely outside its field, and their relationship is governed by ordinary constitutional protections, including the line of authority recognising choice of partner as an aspect of personal liberty.

What the Court held

The Act is not attracted absent an actual conversion

The Court held that two consenting adults are entitled to live together irrespective of the religion they profess, and that such a relationship does not automatically attract the 2021 Act in the absence of any act of conversion. The statute, the Court clarified, does not prohibit interfaith relationships or marriages; it regulates only conversion carried out through misrepresentation, force, coercion, undue influence, fraud or allurement. Even interfaith marriage, per se, is not prohibited under the Act.

Crucially, the Court recorded the evidentiary position across the batch: in none of the twelve cases had any FIR or complaint been lodged alleging that one petitioner's religion had been converted, or that conversion had been attempted. Absent that trigger, the Act's machinery did not engage at all. The argument that interfaith cohabitation, standing alone, set the statute in motion was therefore rejected on the statute's own terms.

Choice of partner is intrinsic to Article 21

The Court located the right to live with a partner of one's choice, irrespective of religion, within the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21. Interference in such a personal relationship was characterised as a serious encroachment on the freedom of choice of the two individuals concerned. This reasoning draws directly on the Supreme Court's protection-of-couples line — Shafin Jahan v. Asokan K.M. and Shakti Vahini v. Union of India — and on the privacy foundation laid in K.S. Puttaswamy, applied here at the level of the High Court's writ jurisdiction.

The absence of any conversion allegation

This factual finding is the hinge of the judgment. The 2021 Act supplies machinery — notice, declaration, investigation — that is keyed to the event of conversion by prohibited means. Where no such event is alleged, the machinery has nothing to act upon. The Court treated the couples as adults exercising a constitutionally protected choice, allowed the petitions, and directed the State authorities to protect the petitioners' life and liberty.

The doctrinal architecture

Noori supplies a clean, repeatable ratio for a class of cases that the Allahabad bench sees in volume. Its first move is to characterise the 2021 Act as trigger-bound: its provisions engage only where there is an act, or an attempted act, of conversion by force, fraud or allurement. An interfaith relationship or marriage, without conversion, falls outside the statute's field entirely. This is a reading that takes the Act seriously on its own language rather than treating interfaith cohabitation as a freestanding offence.

The second move is to draw the boundary against the other Allahabad line — the single-judge decisions that have refused protection, or treated Arya Samaj marriages as invalid, where couples sought to marry without complying with the Act's notice and declaration requirements after a conversion. Noori harmonises those apparently divergent views by locating the dividing line precisely at the existence or absence of an actual conversion. Where a conversion has occurred or been attempted without statutory compliance, the friction in the case law persists; where no conversion is alleged at all, Noori supplies the answer.

The third move is to fold the matter into the established constitutional protection of intimate choice. By treating choice of partner irrespective of religion as intrinsic to Article 21, the Court places interfaith live-in cohabitation between consenting adults on the same footing as the protected relationships in Shafin Jahan and Shakti Vahini — and makes police protection, not statutory scrutiny, the default response to private threats.

The structure of the reasoning matters as much as its result. The Court does not declare the anti-conversion law unconstitutional, nor does it read down any of its provisions. It instead delimits the law's field of operation, holding that the field simply does not include interfaith relationships in which no conversion has occurred. This is a more modest and more durable move than a constitutional challenge would be: it leaves the statute intact for the conduct it was enacted to regulate — conversions secured by force, fraud or allurement — while removing from its reach a category of relationships the State had sought to bring within it. By keeping the analysis at the level of statutory scope rather than statutory validity, the Court reaches a result that does not depend on the outcome of the pending validity challenge before the Supreme Court.

The evidentiary discipline of the judgment is also worth noting. The Court did not assume the absence of conversion; it recorded, across all twelve petitions, that no FIR or complaint alleging conversion or attempted conversion had been lodged against any petitioner. The Act's machinery is keyed to that allegation, and its absence is what takes the cases outside the statute. This makes the ratio precise and replicable: the dividing line is the existence or non-existence of an alleged conversion by prohibited means, and a court applying Noori must look first to whether any such allegation has been made before asking whether the Act is engaged at all.

What the judgment did not decide

Noori did not resolve the parallel single-judge friction over couples who have converted, or attempted conversion, without complying with the Act's notice and declaration machinery. That question — when, and how strictly, the 2021 Act's procedural requirements bite once a conversion is in play — remains contested, and may eventually call for a Division Bench or larger-bench clarification.

Nor did the Court pronounce on the constitutional validity of the 2021 Act as a whole. The challenge to the UP statute, and to the cognate anti-conversion laws of Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand, is pending before the Supreme Court; Noori operates within the assumption that the Act is valid and simply maps its field, holding that interfaith unions without conversion lie outside it.

After the judgment

Noori is likely to be cited heavily across the steady stream of interfaith protection petitions before the Allahabad and Lucknow benches. It supplies a ratio that is easy to apply: no conversion alleged, Act not attracted, protection follows. For couples who face family hostility but have not converted, the judgment converts what had become an uncertain, fact-sensitive inquiry into a near-default entitlement to protection.

It also feeds the larger constitutional debate. As the Supreme Court considers the validity of anti-conversion statutes across several States, decisions like Noori — which read these laws narrowly and keep interfaith liberty within Article 21 — shape the doctrinal terrain on which that challenge will be argued. The judgment does not settle the validity question, but it models a reading under which the Act regulates a specific harm rather than policing the religious composition of personal relationships.

Related on Valkya

• Shreya Singhal v. Union of India: striking down Section 66A
• K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India: the nine-judge privacy declaration
• Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India: internet as an Article 19 right

Sources

1. Verdictum — Noori v. State of U.P. (2026:AHC:39447) case report: https://www.verdictum.in/court-updates/high-courts/allahabad-high-court/noori-v-state-of-up-2026ahc39447-inter-faith-hindu-muslim-relationship-1608493
2. LiveLaw — Allahabad High Court on interfaith relationships and the UP anti-conversion law: https://www.livelaw.in/high-court/allahabad-high-court/allahabad-high-court-interfaith-relationships-up-anti-conversion-law-524320
3. BarandBench — Interfaith marriage and live-in relationship not prohibited by UP's anti-conversion law: https://www.barandbench.com/news/interfaith-marriage-live-in-relationship-not-prohibited-by-ups-anti-conversion-law