On September 14, the case of a Muslim police officer in West Bengal made national news.Bushra Bano, the additional superintendent of police in Kharagpur, had put out a video encouraging young students to prepare and appear for the civil service examination as she had done, even though she had a good job teaching abroad. She began with the cultural greeting ‘assalamualaikum’, a greeting that means peace be upon you. I have used the same word when greeting my Muslim friends. She ended the video with another commonly used term, ‘jazakallah’.A Hindu NGO complained to the government that an officer of India should use only “national expressions” like Vande Mataram and Jai Hind. The state government removed her from that district and put her in another place.In many states a virtual Hindu state is now in operation. Men of the hard right may chant the names of their gods in the public square. They may chant them inside government buildings. No officer is transferred for that. A Muslim officer wishes her students peace and loses her district. The rule is written down nowhere. Everybody understands it.Ever since the new BJP government was formed, the Muslim and Christian minorities have been the targets of incessant harassment, hatred and violence. For the first time in modern Indian history, violence against Christians has spiralled out of control, and Bano’s state of West Bengal has announced it will bring its own version of the anti-conversion laws. The chief minister knows that a strident anti-minority stance will keep his masters in New Delhi pleased with him. It appears that has become his main focus rather than governance.Now foreign readers will read this as a case of persecution of Muslims in India, but they will only be half-correct. An interpretation that treats this as religious discrimination against minorities will miss the point of what is going on in India across the board.The first clause of Article 25 guarantees India’s citizens freedom of conscience, and only after that is the freedom to profess and practise religion laid down.This order matters because in the UN and in many nations the freedom of conscience is accepted as an inviolable fundamental human right.The right to speech, to dress and to what a scientist writes and teaches comes from that basic right. The state was not given a right over the conscience of the individual. Remove that and we cease to be full humans.The Indian state began with the anti-conversion laws and has moved on to the freedom of conscience itself, and wants to control that. Yet the constitution did not give the state that right.So in Bano’s case the state has infringed on her right to use her cultural term for blessing and greeting. It sends a message to others about what the state might do when they exercise their freedom of conscience.When it comes to religion, the citizen who intends to change his faith now has to notify the magistrate. An official then inquires into the motive. The burden is put on the citizen to prove that his decision was freely made. Conscience is now being audited. Challenges to these laws lie in the Supreme Court awaiting hearing, and citizens wait as the anti-conversion laws are weaponised in the north Indian states.This pattern of state control has gone well past the issue of religion.It has reached the right to what kind of food Indians eat.India is mistakenly described abroad as a vegetarian country. It is not.The government’s own health survey tells another fact. About 87% of men and 75% of women consume meat, eggs or fish. In only four states does this percentage fall below or to 50%.The meat eaters are often the poor, the lower castes, the tribal peoples, the Muslims, the Christians and the Hindus of the coasts. On September 12, at the BRICS summit in Delhi, the leaders of some of the world’s largest economies were served an entirely vegetarian state dinner.If the menu was meant to communicate that a majority of India is vegetarian, it is simply not true. If it was meant to communicate Indian nationalism, then the majority of India would be non-national.This has reached the dress colours Indian sportspeople wear. Though blue is the normal colour that Indian sportspeople have worn, recently the women’s hockey team came out in saffron, the colour the Hindu right identifies with.It affects what a woman wears. A state that forbids the wearing of a headscarf and a state that enforces it make the same mistake. I would defend the woman who wants to wear a head scarf and the woman who does not want to wear one. It is the choice of the woman.Without question it has affected writing, the arts and the movies. Independent authors and commentators are now described as ‘urban Naxals’, and now there is the new term ‘dimagi Naxal’, a phrase that moves a disagreement from the newspaper page into the security file. Publishers are cautious.The film industry, which once produced the most multi-religious stories and reflected popular culture, now checks how a scene will be taken by those in power before it is written and directed.This attack on the freedom to think and to have the scientific mind has now reached the school curriculum. This will do immeasurable damage to India’s future in producing scientific minds and a scientific culture.There have been attempts to teach Indian children to accept as fact that there was aviation in India in the past, based on popular myths, and to legitimise the idea that there was stem cell science back then.No religion is strengthened by this, because the young minds will one day find out the truth. This is not censorship from outside. It is a forced illiteracy from within.An authoritarian state that means to win the technology race might control what its citizens say about politics. Will it dare tell its engineers and scientists that there is no difference between physics and myth?India would do well to remember that every major social reform it is proud of began as an offence to someone’s cultural tradition.The ending of widow burning, the assault on untouchability and the raising of the age of marriage came about because cultural norms were challenged.India’s friends abroad tend to raise these questions as minority protection, which allows them to be answered as interference in a sovereign country’s communal affairs. This should be raised for what it really is, an assault on the human conscience in the world’s largest democracy.Bano wished her students peace according to her culture. The republic did not like it.Joseph D’Souza is president of the All India Christian Council and archbishop of the Anglican Good Shepherd Church of India.