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.