India’s Anti Superstition Gap Why Reform Lags After Dabholkar and Lankesh
Narendra Dabholkar was killed on a morning walk, not in a courtroom, not at a rally, not in the middle of a riot. He was shot on 20 August 2013 in Pune after spending nearly two decades asking Maharashtra to outlaw practices that preyed on fear, grief, illness and poverty.
Six days later, the state did what it had failed to do for years. It passed the anti-superstition law by ordinance.
That sequence still defines India’s reform failure. The country has not lacked warnings. It has not lacked draft laws, case studies, public outrage or brave campaigners. It has lacked the will to turn outrage into a working legal system.
In 2026, the question is no longer whether exploitative godmen can harm people. Courts, police records and survivor accounts have answered that. The harder question is why India still treats such exploitation as a state-level exception rather than a national policy problem.
Dabholkar’s law showed what reform can do when the state acts
Maharashtra’s law is commonly called the Black Magic Act. Its full name, the Maharashtra Prevention and Eradication of Human Sacrifice and Other Inhuman, Evil and Aghori Practices and Black Magic Act, 2013, makes its ambition clear.
It does not criminalise faith. It targets harmful acts done in the name of faith.
That distinction matters. India’s constitutional promise includes freedom of conscience and religion. A democratic state should not police private belief. People must remain free to pray, visit shrines, consult spiritual guides, follow rituals and live within traditions that give meaning to their lives.
The state’s duty begins where belief becomes coercion, injury, fraud, sexual abuse, forced isolation, medical neglect or public humiliation. Dabholkar understood this line with unusual clarity. His campaign did not ask the state to declare anyone rational or irrational. It asked the state to stop practices that exploited vulnerability.
The Maharashtra Act gave police a sharper tool against acts such as human sacrifice, claims of supernatural cures that lead to harm, forcing people to perform degrading rituals, and extracting money through fear of divine or occult punishment. It recognised a reality that ordinary criminal law often misses. Abuse by a self-styled spiritual authority does not always look like a conventional street crime. It may come wrapped in ritual, obedience and social pressure.
That is why the law mattered. It named a pattern.
In ordinary criminal law, a victim may need to frame a complaint as cheating, assault, rape, criminal intimidation, wrongful confinement or extortion. Those provisions remain essential. Yet they do not always capture the full method of control. The abuser may not simply threaten violence. They may claim supernatural power. They may say illness, infertility, business losses or family misfortune will worsen unless the victim obeys. They may turn the victim’s relatives into enforcers.
A special law helps the justice system see the mechanism, not just the isolated act.
Still, Maharashtra also shows the danger of symbolic reform. Passing a law is only the first mile. Notification of rules, police training, public awareness, victim support and prosecution capacity decide whether the statute reaches the people it was meant to protect.
Thirteen years after Dabholkar’s murder, that unfinished work has returned to court.
Maharashtra’s strongest law still faces a basic enforcement question
In April 2026, the arrest of self-styled godman Ashok Kharat in Nashik brought the issue back to the Bombay High Court. He faced twelve counts involving alleged sexual and financial exploitation. The allegations remain matters for legal process, and any accused person is entitled to due process and the presumption of innocence.
The policy significance lies elsewhere. Activists filed a fresh petition arguing that the Maharashtra Act’s own implementation rules had not been notified. Their claim was stark. If the rules were missing, victims and police lacked a clear working process to invoke the law.
That kind of gap is not a clerical detail. It can decide whether a survivor is turned away at the police station, whether officers know which sections apply, whether evidence is gathered properly, and whether the case is reduced to a narrower charge that misses the pattern of coercion.
A law without operational rules can become a locked cupboard. Everyone knows it exists. Few know how to open it.
The debate over anti-superstition law India often gets trapped in noise about belief versus disbelief. Maharashtra’s experience points to a more practical concern. Can a victim use the law? Can a police officer apply it? Can prosecutors build a case under it? Can courts see consistent enforcement rather than sporadic action after public outrage?
For a social reform law, implementation is not a second chapter. It is the law’s moral test.
The Maharashtra case also shows why legislation passed after tragedy needs institutional follow-through. Dabholkar’s assassination created political momentum. The ordinance answered the moment. But moral urgency fades, files move slowly, and oppositional lobbies regroup. Without administrative persistence, the state can honour a reformer in speeches while leaving the reform itself partly stranded.
That is the cruelest form of delay. It does not openly repeal the law. It lets the law breathe weakly.
Lankesh’s murder widened the reform question beyond Maharashtra
Gauri Lankesh’s murder in 2017 deepened the relationship between anti-superstition work and democratic courage. The journalist supported rationalist and anti-superstition campaigns. Karnataka passed its own law later that year, months after she was killed.
Karnataka’s law, like Maharashtra’s, attempted to draw a line between protected religious practice and exploitative, inhuman or degrading acts. The timing mattered. Once again, reform followed bloodshed.
That pattern should disturb any democracy. Reformers should not have to die before a legislature acts. Journalists, rationalists and social workers should not become the price of legal attention.
Dabholkar and Lankesh came from different public roles, but their deaths sit in the same civic memory. Both stood against organised intimidation. Both insisted that reason and compassion could coexist with cultural life. Both made enemies because they challenged power that hides behind sanctity.
Their legacy is not anti-religious. It is anti-exploitation.
This distinction deserves repetition because it is where opponents often blur the debate. Anti-superstition laws do not need to mock belief or flatten India’s spiritual diversity. They can protect it. A society that allows fraud, sexual exploitation and public humiliation in the name of spirituality does not defend religion. It defends impunity.
Good law should protect the temple-goer, the dargah visitor, the church member, the devotee, the sceptic and the person with no religious affiliation. It should protect anyone whose vulnerability is manipulated by a person claiming special powers.
That is why the absence of comparable laws across most of India is so glaring.
Several Indian states have targeted related issues such as witch-hunting, often after horrific violence against women. Those laws are necessary. But they are not the same as broad anti-superstition frameworks aimed at the wider ecosystem of coercive spiritual fraud, degrading practices and godman abuse.
Beyond Maharashtra and Karnataka, India still lacks a broad anti-superstition statute. It also lacks a national framework that can guide states, support policing and clarify the overlap with criminal law, health law, advertising standards and consumer protection.
The result is a patchwork. A victim’s protection may depend less on the harm suffered and more on the state in which it occurred.
That is not acceptable for a constitutional republic.
India’s gap is political before it is legal
It is tempting to describe the problem as legislative complexity. India is a large country. Religion is sensitive. Criminal law, public order and health involve federal questions. Bad drafting can create real risks.
Those concerns deserve care. They do not justify paralysis.
The core gap is political. Many lawmakers fear that any anti-superstition measure will be portrayed as anti-faith. Some worry about angering influential religious entrepreneurs. Some prefer the safety of general criminal law because it avoids opening a public fight. Others support reform in principle but do not spend political capital on rules, budgets and training.
So the file waits.
This hesitation creates four policy failures.
The first failure is definitional silence. Without a clear framework, police may treat spiritual exploitation as a private matter, a family dispute or a civil issue. Victims may struggle to explain that the harm came through a system of claimed supernatural authority.
The second failure is uneven enforcement. A dramatic case may trigger arrests under general criminal law. Less visible cases may never be registered properly. The legal response depends on attention, not principle.
The third failure is weak prevention. A functioning framework could support public education, stop dangerous claims earlier, and warn citizens against exploitative practices. Criminal prosecution matters, but prevention saves people before harm becomes irreversible.
The fourth failure is institutional fear. Officers and administrators may hesitate when a case involves a powerful religious figure. Clear rules reduce that fear. They tell the system what to do when belief becomes abuse.
This is where consumer protection enters the debate. India has built institutions to address misleading advertisements, unfair trade practices and consumer harm. Yet spiritual fraud often slips between categories. A person may pay money for a promised cure, fertility blessing, examination success, business recovery or relief from alleged black magic. The transaction has a consumer aspect, but the injury may also involve coercion, shame, assault or medical delay.
As policymakers discuss broader consumer protection India frameworks in 2026, spiritual fraud policy should not be the file nobody wants to open. It belongs in the same conversation as misleading health claims, financial scams and coercive sales practices. The method may be spiritual. The harm is often material, bodily and psychological.
A careful national approach would not ask regulators to judge theology. It would ask them to judge deception, coercion, abuse and measurable harm.
Other democracies show that special labels are not always required
The United States did not convict NXIVM leader Keith Raniere under a special anti-cult law. Prosecutors used existing laws, including racketeering, sex trafficking and forced labour provisions. Raniere was convicted and sentenced to 120 years in prison.
The lesson is not that India should copy American criminal law. The US has its own legal history, prosecutorial culture and institutional problems. The lesson is narrower and useful. A democracy can act against coercive spiritual or self-improvement movements without creating a thought-police regime.
The focus can remain on conduct.
Racketeering law helped US prosecutors describe a pattern across acts. Forced labour law addressed coercion. Sex trafficking law addressed exploitation. The legal theory did not require the court to decide whether NXIVM’s teachings were strange, persuasive or sincere. It required the system to prove criminal conduct.
India already has many general provisions that can be used in comparable situations. Cheating, extortion, rape, sexual assault, wrongful confinement, criminal intimidation, trafficking and abetment provisions may apply depending on facts. Financial laws may apply where money is moved through illegal channels. Health and drug laws may apply where fake cures are sold.
The problem is not absence of every possible offence. The problem is fragmentation.
When a self-styled godman controls a group through fear, sexual access, money extraction and claims of supernatural power, ordinary provisions may catch pieces of the conduct. They may not capture the method that made the pieces possible. A good framework helps investigators connect the dots.
That can be done in two ways.
One route is broad state-level anti-superstition law, as Maharashtra and Karnataka attempted. Another route is a national model that guides how existing criminal, consumer, health and financial laws should be used when spiritual authority becomes a tool of exploitation.
India likely needs both. States can legislate directly on public order and related harms. The Union can support model laws, national guidance, training resources, data collection, consumer protection standards and inter-state investigation where organisations operate across borders.
The aim should not be to create a special offence for every form of manipulation. Overcriminalisation can create vague laws and selective enforcement. The aim should be to give police, prosecutors and victims a clear map.
That map must avoid three traps.
Criminalising belief
Laws should not punish prayer, ritual, spiritual teaching or private practice unless linked to defined harm.
Writing vague offences
Terms must be specific enough to guide police and protect civil liberties.
Ignoring power
Laws should recognise that a person claiming divine or occult authority can create coercion beyond ordinary persuasion.
Treating all cases as cheating
Financial fraud is only one part of many abusive spiritual-control cases.
The balance is difficult. It is not impossible.
A national framework should protect faith by targeting coercion
India does not need a war on religion. It needs a rights-based framework against exploitation carried out in religion’s name.
A serious national policy could begin with a model law and implementation code. The model law would help states legislate without drafting from scratch. The implementation code would help ensure that laws do not sit unused because rules were never notified.
Such a framework should include five practical commitments.
Clear definitions of prohibited conduct
The law should list specific harmful acts. These may include human sacrifice, physical assault framed as exorcism, degrading public rituals, sexual exploitation under spiritual pretext, preventing medical treatment through coercive claims, and extracting money through threats of supernatural harm.
The narrower and clearer the wording, the stronger the law becomes.
Mandatory notification of rules within a fixed time
Every anti-superstition law should require the government to notify implementation rules within a defined period. If the rules are not notified, the responsible department should have to explain the delay publicly or to the legislature.
A law should not wait thirteen years for a procedural challenge to reveal whether it can function properly.
Training for police, prosecutors and magistrates
Cases involving spiritual coercion are hard to investigate. Victims may fear social stigma, family backlash or divine punishment. Evidence may include payments, messages, witness testimony, medical records, travel patterns and repeated rituals.
Training should help officers ask better questions and avoid two common mistakes, dismissing the complaint as superstition or ridiculing the complainant for believing.
Respectful investigation is not softness. It is how evidence is found.
Victim support and witness protection
People leaving coercive spiritual networks may lose family, shelter, income and community. Some may face threats. Some may carry trauma from sexual abuse or public humiliation. Legal reform must connect with counselling, safe reporting channels and witness protection where needed.
A statute that names the offence but leaves the complainant alone will fail many survivors.
Consumer and advertising oversight
Not every harmful claim begins with a crime scene. Some begin with a poster promising miracle cures, a televised claim, a social media clip, a paid ritual package or a public event where fear is turned into income.
Consumer protection law should address paid claims of supernatural cure, guaranteed outcomes and deceptive spiritual services where money changes hands. Health regulators should act when such claims interfere with medical treatment.
This avoids a false choice between criminal prosecution and inaction. Some cases need arrest and trial. Others need penalties, takedown orders, licence scrutiny, financial investigation or public warnings.
Godman regulation should be understood in this practical sense. The state need not regulate holiness. It must regulate harm.
The counterargument deserves an answer
The strongest objection to anti-superstition law is that the state may misuse it. In a country where police powers can be abused, vague moral laws are dangerous. A poorly drafted statute could target minority practices, folk traditions or unpopular sects. It could become another tool for harassment.
This concern is real. It should shape reform, not stop it.
The answer is precision, oversight and constitutional discipline. Laws must punish defined harmful conduct, not cultural unfamiliarity. They must require evidence of coercion, injury, exploitation, fraud or degrading treatment. They must protect voluntary adult religious practice. They must include safeguards against malicious complaints and selective enforcement.
Courts will also have a role. They must test these laws against constitutional freedoms and ensure that the state does not overreach. Civil society must monitor enforcement. Legislatures must review data.
Yet the possibility of misuse cannot become a permanent excuse for doing nothing. Every area of criminal law carries risk. The state still legislates against domestic violence, trafficking, bonded labour, financial fraud and child abuse because the alternative is worse. The right response to state power is accountable law, not legal absence.
A democracy must be able to say two things at once. Faith is protected. Exploitation is punishable.
The file needs courage more than novelty
India’s anti-superstition gap is not a mystery. Maharashtra showed that a law can be written. Karnataka showed that another state can follow. The NXIVM prosecution in the United States showed that democracies can pursue coercive movements through existing legal tools when prosecutors are willing to build the case.
The missing ingredient is sustained political will.
That will has three parts.
The first is legislative courage. More states should pass clear anti-superstition laws, and Parliament should support a national model framework that respects federal boundaries while setting a rights-based standard.
The second is administrative honesty. Governments must notify rules, train officials, publish guidance and collect data. A law hidden in the statute book is not reform.
The third is civic patience. Social reform rarely arrives as one dramatic victory. It moves through petitions, police circulars, district training sessions, survivor testimony, court monitoring and public education. That work is less visible than a headline. It is also where change becomes real.
Dabholkar and Lankesh did not ask India to abandon faith. They asked India to defend reason, dignity and freedom from those who profit by frightening people. Their deaths should not remain ritual anniversaries for speeches and hashtags. They should be treated as unfinished legislative instructions.
As India debates consumer protection, digital fraud, health misinformation and financial abuse in 2026, spiritual exploitation must be brought into the same policy frame. Not because every spiritual claim is fraud. Because some frauds survive precisely by calling themselves spiritual.
The file nobody wants to open first is often the file that most needs public courage. India has already paid too high a price for delay. The next step is not to mourn reformers better. It is to build the law they asked for, notify it, fund it, enforce it and make it usable for the people who need it most.
