The resounding success of Remake India 2025

An American scholar has written a book in which he tries to explain China’s recent rise. Dan Wang’s thesis is that China is a society of engineers and its government is the rule of engineers, in contrast to the US, which he classifies as a society of lawyers. China is good at manufacturing and building things, he says, while the US is not. Why is this the case?

The answer lies in the choices that the Chinese state has made, especially in 2015, when it laid out the ‘Made in China 2025’ plan. Sometimes these choices do not work, as Wang points out. An engineering-led mindset produced China’s brutal lockdown in Shanghai — and things like the one-child policy. But it is also why China has succeeded in industrial policy at the highest level (high-speed railways, renewable energy, electric vehicles, ship building) and has caught up in aviation, semiconductors, rocket science and artificial intelligence.

In all these areas, what the state has intended to achieve, it has delivered. This is an interesting theme, and we will keep returning to it in this column. Today, however, I wanted to ask ourselves the same question: What has the Indian state intended to achieve, and has it been successful at this?

When it comes to the economy, to (un)employment and, especially, to India’s foreign policy, the answer is now clear — on both sides of the argument, the debate is only about who is to blame for the failures. But that does not concern us here today. Let us look at an area where the Indian state has succeeded in the choices it has made instead.

September 2025 has seen the passage of the Rajasthan Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Bill, 2025. It is aimed at two things: criminalising interfaith marriage between Hindus and Muslims and preventing people, particularly the marginalised communities, from becoming Christians.

Like other laws of this type, the Rajasthan law punishes conversions — but not all of them. It says: ‘If any person re-converts to [their] original religion, i.e, [their]. ancestral religion, the same shall not be deemed to be a conversion’ and explains ancestral religion as ‘the religion in which [the] forefathers/ancestors of the person had faith, belief or was practised’.

Readers will not need to be told what this means. This phrasing was introduced to us in the first law of our era on this subject. This was the Uttarakhand Freedom of Religion Act, 2018. It was followed by laws in Himachal Pradesh (2019), Uttar Pradesh (2020), Madhya Pradesh (2021), Gujarat (2021), Haryana (2022) and Karnataka (2022). All of these laws were passed by the BJP.

The Rajasthan law adds something new, however. It has also criminalised all forms of propagation of religion. It says that the dissemination of information, ideas or beliefs through media, social media and messaging applications is unlawful if this is interpreted as ‘propagation of religion intended for conversion’.

It also increases the punishment: up to 14 years in jail, up to 20 years if the person changing faith is a Dalit or Adivasi citizen. All of these BJP laws are in violation of pretty much the entire panel of fundamental rights, but they have become acceptable in our society. It will be the rare reader, even of this column, who knew about the Rajasthan law cleared on 9 September, though, because this is no longer ‘news’ as our TV debates understand that word.

To conclude, it is important to accept that the state has succeeded in achieving here what it set out to do. Politically, it is difficult to reverse these laws because they have been made socially acceptable. The number of people either in favour of these laws or disinterested in them outnumbers those who are in favour of their repeal.

The Karnataka law came into effect on 17 May 2022. Like the others, it requires people wanting to convert to give 30 days’ notice to the district magistrate. This bureaucrat will then put the application up on a notice board in his office and in the office of the tehsildar, calling for objections.

After it won the assembly elections in May 2023, the Congress said it would undo this law. The following month, 15 June, a news article was published under this headline: ‘Siddaramaiah-led Karnataka government withdraws anti-conversion law’.

That did not happen, however. A few days ago, on 8 September 2025, it was reported that the government ‘will seek legal opinion on the Karnataka Protection of Right to Freedom of Religion Act, popularly known as the ‘anti-conversion law’, and decide on further action’. The law, then, is still intact.

The India nation-state, under the BJP, made some choices on behalf of Indians beginning in 2014 that resulted in laws on beef (beginning 2015), on freedom of religion (beginning 2018), on citizenship (beginning 2019) and on other things linked to the ending of pluralism and to the targeting of minorities. It has achieved what it has intended to achieve here.

We may not have had a ‘Made in China 2025’ policy. Whatever unserious efforts we have made on this and other fronts may have flopped. But it is hard not to accept the total victory of the ‘Remake India 2025’ policy, whose fruits we can see in the laws, the media and, indeed, in society all around us. 

 Views are personal. More of Aakar Patel’s writings may be read here