In April 2026, the Governor of Punjab gave his assent to the Jaagat Jot Sri Guru Granth Sahib Satkar (Amendment) Act, which criminalises sacrilege against the Guru Granth Sahib with sentences running as high as life imprisonment. The law arrived almost immediately after passage, closing out a decade of agitation that followed the desecration incidents at Bargari and Burj Jawahar Singh Wala in 2015, and the police firing at Behbal Kalan that killed two protesters. On paper, this looks like routine State legislation responding to genuine communal hurt. In substance, it is India’s most severe working sacrilege law: a statute that punishes the physical desecration of a sacred text with sentences up to and including life.
The Constitution declares secularism part of its “basic structure,” and a law of this kind sits awkwardly against that declaration. It permits, and in Punjab’s case has now enacted, punishment for disrespect to religion in a nation-state that officially professes no religion of its own and guarantees every citizen the right to free speech. Punjab’s law is only the most vivid recent example of a wider pattern: a body of provisions, some colonial in origin and some entirely contemporary, that treat criticism of religious belief and practice as a matter for the police rather than public debate.
Two wrongs, one writ
Blasphemy, in the sense English ecclesiastical law first gave the word, is an expressive wrong: contemptuous or irreverent speech, writing or imagery about a god, a prophet, a scripture or a set of beliefs. Sacrilege is a different kind of wrong, the violation or defilement of something set apart as sacred, whether a place of worship, a rite, or a physical object. It has historically been understood as a matter of conduct, akin to trespass or vandalism, rather than expression. The distinction sounds academic, but Indian law actually draws it on the statute book. Section 298 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, carrying forward the old Section 295 of the Penal Code, punishes injuring or defiling a place of worship with intent to insult a religion, a sacrilege-type offence aimed at conduct. Section 299 of the BNS, carrying forward the old Section 295A, punishes deliberate and malicious insult to religious beliefs by words, signs or visible representation. Reference works on Indian law describe this expressive offence as the country’s general prohibition on blasphemy.
Measured against that distinction, Punjab’s new law does not sit cleanly on the sacrilege side of it. The Act’s own definition of “sacrilege” is written in two parts: it covers any “wilful and deliberate” act of desecration through physical damage, defacement, burning, tearing or theft of the Saroop, the physical volume of the Guru Granth Sahib or part of it, but the same clause extends sacrilege equally to acts committed “by words, either spoken or written, or by signs or by visible representations or through electronic means,” wherever this is of a nature to hurt the religious feelings of persons professing the Sikh faith. The first half criminalises what is done to the book itself. The second half criminalises expressing a disrespectful opinion about it, which is precisely the blasphemy-type wrong the distinction above is meant to set apart.
The line is real, but it does not always survive contact with how these laws are enforced. In 2007, the Karnataka editor B.V. Seetaram, along with his wife and co-director Rohini, was arrested after the Kannada dailies they ran published articles questioning the right of Digambara Jain monks to appear naked in public. Nothing had been physically defiled. The entire complaint concerned words in print, precisely the terrain the blasphemy-type Section 295A exists to cover. That the case still produced an arrest and days in judicial custody shows how quickly an expressive complaint can escalate into criminal process once religious offence is invoked.
A colonial ancestry
India’s principal blasphemy provision, Section 295A of the old Indian Penal Code (now Section 299 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, in force since July 2024), was not an indigenous invention. Its origin lies in the story of Rangila Rasul, a pamphlet about the marriages of the Prophet Muhammad published in Lahore in May 1924 by Mahashe Rajpal, under the anonymous authorship of an Arya Samajist, Pandit Chamupati. The pamphlet did not appear out of nowhere: it was written, on the evidence of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s own account of the affair, in direct retaliation for an earlier Muslim pamphlet, Sitaka Chinala, which had made insulting claims about Sita, the wife of Lord Rama, and it arrived in the middle of a decade in which Hindu and Muslim publicists in Punjab were trading such attacks with regularity. Rajpal was prosecuted under Section 153A, the general provision against promoting enmity between communities. A magistrate convicted him in 1926, the Lahore Sessions Court upheld the conviction in February 1927, and the Lahore High Court, in a judgment by Justice Dalip Singh on May 4, 1927, acquitted him, holding that however malicious and wounding the pamphlet was, Section 153A was meant to prevent attacks on a living community, not polemics against a deceased religious founder, however scurrilous.
The acquittal caused precisely the disorder the law had been trying to prevent, and Justice Dalip Singh himself had urged the legislature to close the gap he had just identified. It did so quickly: a bill was introduced within months, refined by a Select Committee that included Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and enacted as Section 295A, receiving the Governor-General’s assent on September 22, 1927. The new section criminalised “deliberate and malicious” acts intended to outrage the religious feelings of any class of citizens, whether by words, signs, or visible representation, and now, under the BNS, explicitly by electronic means. The law arrived too late to touch the original pamphlet, and it did not, in the event, prevent what came next. On April 6, 1929, nineteen months after Section 295A had already entered the statute book, a young Lahore carpenter named Ilm-ud-din stabbed Rajpal to death, declaring that he had taken revenge for the Prophet. Jinnah himself argued Ilm-ud-din’s unsuccessful appeal against the death sentence; he was executed that October. Whatever else it achieved, Section 295A cannot be credited with preventing the very killing its enactment is sometimes said to have followed. In 1957, the Supreme Court in Ramji Lal Modi versus State of Uttar Pradesh upheld the provision’s constitutionality regardless, reasoning that it fell within the “public order” exception to free speech carved out by Article 19(2) of the Constitution.
The reasoning has held for nearly a century, but it rests on a fiction that has always troubled civil libertarians: that hurt feelings, however genuinely felt, are equivalent to a threat to public order. A law meant to prevent riots has, in practice, become a general licence to prosecute writers, film-makers, and cartoonists whenever a sufficiently organised group of the offended chooses to complain. The Select Committee that drafted Section 295A inserted the words “deliberate and malicious” specifically to protect social reformers who might need to attack superstition or ill practice to bring about change. Jinnah went further still: addressing the Central Legislative Assembly on 5 September 1927, he argued that the law had to protect “those who are engaged in bona fide and honest criticism of a religion,” alongside historians and truth-seekers, from being caught by the same net meant for wanton vilification. The trouble is that “bona fide and honest” is not a rule so much as an invitation to a judgment call, and it is subject to the perspective from which it is judged.
The country that gave India this legal inheritance has since gone the other way entirely. In England and Wales, the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel, from which Section 295A’s own drafting ultimately descends, were abolished by Section 79 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, which received Royal Assent on May 8, 2008, and took effect that July; Scotland repealed its own common law blasphemy offence in 2021, in force from 2024.
India inherited a colonial category of law that its former coloniser has since dismantled across almost all of its own territory, and then, in Punjab’s case nearly a century later, made its own version of the underlying idea more severe rather than less.
Punjab’s long road to a formal sacrilege law
Punjab’s journey towards a codified sacrilege law illustrates how these pressures play out at the State level. In 2016, the then Akali Dal-BJP government passed a bill imposing life imprisonment for sacrilege committed specifically against the Guru Granth Sahib. The Centre returned it, objecting that a law protecting only one religion’s scripture could not sit easily with India’s secular Constitution. In 2018, the succeeding Congress government tried again, this time extending the same life sentence to the Guru Granth Sahib, the Bhagavad Gita, the Quran, and the Bible through a new Section 295AA of the Penal Code. That Bill, too, was returned without Presidential assent.
A further attempt followed in July 2025, when the Aam Aadmi Party government introduced the Punjab Prevention of Offences Against Holy Scripture(s) Bill, again covering all four texts, with sentences ranging from ten years to life. That Bill was sent to a select committee and has since been effectively shelved. Instead, the State government found a narrower route: rather than amending the central Penal Code, it amended an existing State law concerned specifically with the ceremonial custody of the Guru Granth Sahib. Because this technically falls within the State’s own legislative competence, the government argued that it requires no Presidential assent, and the Governor’s signature was enough to bring it into force in April 2026.
The manoeuvre has not gone unchallenged. A petition before the Punjab and Haryana High Court argues that a life sentence is a matter of criminal law, which sits on the Concurrent List and therefore cannot simply bypass central scrutiny by dressing itself up as an amendment to a ceremonial statute. Critics have also pointed out that, in covering only the Sikh scripture, the current law revives precisely the objection that sank the 2016 attempt: a State cannot credibly claim to be protecting “communal harmony” while legislating in favour of one faith’s sentiments and not another’s. Whichever way the litigation goes, the sequence of events across a decade shows a State legislature persistently trying, by one route or another, to entrench a sacrilege code of ever-increasing severity, undeterred by repeated constitutional rebuffs.
The constitutional contradiction
Secularism was declared part of the Constitution’s unamendable “basic structure” in S.R. Bommai versus Union of India, precisely so that the State could neither favour a religion nor punish disrespect towards one. Article 25 guarantees not just the right to practise religion but, implicitly, the space for social reformers, sceptics and atheists to challenge religious practise, since the same article subjects the right to religious freedom to “public order, morality and health” and permits the State to legislate for social welfare and reform even where this cuts against religious custom. Article 19(1)(a) guarantees free speech in the same breath that Article 19(2) permits “reasonable restrictions” in the interests of public order, decency or morality.
A cartoon, a novel, a documentary, a stray remark on social media: all can be made to fit the language of “insult” without any accompanying threat of actual disorder, and Indian criminal procedure allows a First Information Report to be lodged, and an accused to be arrested, well before any court examines whether the constitutionally required “deliberate and malicious intent” was in fact present. The chilling effect happens at the point of complaint, not at the point of conviction.
The Supreme Court has, in a neighbouring context, already endorsed exactly this objection. In Shreya Singhal versus Union of India in 2015, it struck down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act in its entirety, holding that criminalising online messages using undefined terms such as “offensive” and “menacing” left the provision impermissibly vague, invited arbitrary enforcement, and chilled protected speech in violation of Article 19(1)(a). Section 295A and its BNS successor rest on terms no more precise, “outrage,” “insult,” “religious feelings”, policed after the fact by whichever officer happens to receive the complaint, yet the court has never brought the Shreya Singhal reasoning to bear on the provision whose own constitutionality it settled, without revisiting it since Ramji Lal Modi almost sixty years earlier. The inconsistency reads as reluctance rather than principle: it is easier to strike down a recent statute governing an unfamiliar medium than to unsettle an eighty-year-old precedent with a long and emotionally fraught history behind it.
The Punjab context
Set against Punjab’s law specifically, the contradiction sharpens into several distinct legal problems. The first concerns equality. By protecting only the Guru Granth Sahib and no other scripture, the 2026 Act revives the very objection that sank the 2016 attempt: a provision drawing a line between one community’s sacred text and every other’s needs an “intelligible differentia” bearing a “rational nexus” to its stated purpose of communal harmony, the test the Supreme Court set out in State of West Bengal versus Anwar Ali Sarkar, and it is difficult to see how singling out one faith serves a purpose framed in terms of all of them.
This is not merely a doctrinal prediction. In May 2026, the Anglican Church of India, through its Amritsar bishop, petitioned the Punjab and Haryana High Court arguing that the Act creates a religion-specific penal regime that violates the constitutional guarantee of equality before law, and sought both the quashing of the Act and a stay on its implementation.
The Bench’s response points to an underappreciated wrinkle in the equality argument itself: it reportedly questioned how a church whose own scripture the Act does not touch could claim to be aggrieved by it at all, a question that inadvertently demonstrates the very defect being alleged, since a law can discriminate in structure while leaving those it excludes without the conventional standing to challenge it. The petition remains pending.
The second is a matter of proportionality. The Act’s mandatory minimum sentence, which under its most serious provisions can extend to life imprisonment and leaves no room for a judge to calibrate punishment to the facts of a given case, sits awkwardly beside Mithu versus State of Punjab, in which the Supreme Court struck down a different mandatory sentencing provision precisely because it stripped courts of discretion and so failed the test of a “just, fair and reasonable” procedure that Maneka Gandhi versus Union of India had read into Article 21; that the earlier case also happened to arise out of Punjab makes the parallel almost too neat. The third goes to federal competence. Criminal law sits on the Concurrent List, and Article 254 provides that a State law repugnant to a central enactment on the same subject, such as the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita’s own provisions on sacrilege and on outraging religious feeling, is void to that extent unless it has received Presidential assent under Article 254(2). Punjab avoided that requirement in 2026 by amending a pre-existing, ostensibly ceremonial state statute rather than the BNS directly, an approach now under challenge in the Punjab and Haryana High Court on precisely the ground that a life sentence for the same underlying wrong cannot dodge central scrutiny merely by changing which statute book it sits in. Each of these is a distinct constitutional infirmity, quite apart from the broader secularism argument above, and Punjab’s law arguably carries all three at once.
How laws can curtail the possibility of social reform
The history of Section 295A and its cousins shows how easily laws meant to prevent communal violence have instead been turned against the critique of regressive or simply unconventional religious practice. In 1932, a small collection of Urdu short stories called Angarey, which attacked obscurantist customs and the sexual hypocrisy of some religious figures, was banned soon after publication, and its authors faced threats. Seven Indian States banned the film and book The Da Vinci Code in 2006 on the ground that it offended Christian sentiment, a ban two States later lifted only after High Court intervention.
More recent cases show the pattern continuing under a veneer of literary and scholarly respectability. Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History was withdrawn by Penguin India in 2014 after a civil suit invoking Section 295A. Tamil novelist Perumal Murugan faced a criminal complaint and a mob campaign over his novel Madhorubagan; he announced his own “death” as a writer in 2015 rather than face continued harassment. It took a landmark 2016 Madras High Court judgment, which closed with the appeal to “let the author be resurrected to what he is best at, write,” to quash the case and restore his right to publish. The painter M.F. Husain was hounded into exile and death abroad after decades of prosecutions and threats over his nude depictions of Hindu deities. Taslima Nasrin’s writing has met similar treatment, and the government’s 1988 ban on importing Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses made India one of the first countries, a secular one at that, in the world to act against that novel.
The provision has, if anything, found new life in the era of social media and televised debate, where the underlying act being punished has grown thinner still. In 2018, weeks after the Supreme Court lifted the traditional ban on women of menstruating age entering the Sabarimala temple, the Kerala activist Rehana Fathima was arrested under Section 295A over a Facebook photograph of herself dressed as an Ayyappa devotee, spent over two weeks in judicial custody, and was suspended by her employer within days of her arrest, all over an image rather than an argument. In 2020, the television anchor Amish Devgan called the Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti a ‘lootera’ during a live debate, apologised within days for what he said was an inadvertent slip for a different historical name, and still faced seven separate FIRs across five States; the Supreme Court declined to quash any of them, merely clubbing them together in Ajmer. These cases rarely end in conviction; more often the prosecution goes nowhere. What unites them is that the damage is done well before any verdict, through arrest, through the heckler’s veto of an aggressive, sometimes violent audience, and through the pre-emptive caution of publishers and film certifiers who calculate, reasonably, that no book or film is worth the trouble.
The other direction
It would be incomplete and unfair to the complexity of Indian law to present this as a single uninterrupted march towards religious censorship. India also has statutes that go the other way, actively empowering the State to attack religious or superstitious practice, and the constitutional foundation for this other tendency was laid before the Constitution had even been adopted. Speaking in the Constituent Assembly on December 2, 1948, during the debate on whether personal law should be shielded from legislative reform, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar rejected the idea that religion could claim a veto over social legislation merely because a given custom carried religious sanction. “I personally do not understand why religion should be given this vast, expansive jurisdiction so as to cover the whole of life and to prevent the legislature from encroaching upon that field. After all, what are we having this liberty for? We are having this liberty in order to reform our social system., which is so full of inequities, so full of inequalities, discriminations and other things, which conflict with our fundamental rights. It is, therefore, quite impossible for anybody to conceive that the personal law shall be excluded from the jurisdiction of the State,” Dr. Ambedkar said.
Maharashtra’s Prevention and Eradication of Human Sacrifice and Other Inhuman, Evil and Aghori Practices and Black Magic Act, passed in 2013 after the assassination of the rationalist campaigner Narendra Dabholkar, criminalises a long list of exploitative religious practices, from claiming to cure disease through faith healing to inducing self-flagellation. Karnataka passed a similar law in 2017. The Sati (Prevention) Act of 1987 goes further still, criminalising not only the act of widow immolation but the glorification of it, treating celebratory speech about a religious practice as itself an offence, the mirror image of a blasphemy law rather than its opposite.
The coexistence of these two tendencies, laws that punish criticism of religion and laws that mandate criticism of religious practice, suggests that Indian law has no coherent theory of when religious sentiment deserves protection. What actually governs is a case-by-case political calculation about which practices are currently unpopular enough, or which constituencies are currently powerful enough, to tip the balance one way or the other.
The reformer as blasphemer
The starkest illustration of what this body of law puts at risk is not the outsider mocking a faith he does not share, but the insider attacking his own. In The State of Mysore versus Henry Rodrigues, decided by the Mysore High Court in 1961, a Catholic editor named Henry Rodrigues was tried under Section 295A over an article in his Konkani-language magazine Crusader, titled “Honour to Mary or Dishonour?”, which accused Catholic priests of exploiting the credulous by falsely attributing miracles to the Virgin Mary. His defence argued that since the criticised beliefs and practices were, in his view, superstitious and contrary to the Bible itself, the truth of his charge ought to absolve him. The court, following an earlier Allahabad High Court ruling, rejected this outright: even a wholly true statement, it held, can outrage religious feelings, and Section 295A punishes the intent to outrage rather than the accuracy of what is said. A believer’s sincere, internally argued complaint against his own clergy was treated exactly as the law treats a stranger’s contempt.
The doctrine that truth is no defence is what should give the sharpest pause to anyone tempted to think of a blasphemy law as merely a shield against bigotry. India’s own history is built on reformers who succeeded only because they were prepared to be called blasphemers by their own people. Jyotirao Phule spent the 1870s attacking Brahminical religious authority as the theological scaffolding of caste oppression, recasting Hindu myth in his tract Gulamgiri to expose it as a device for keeping the lower castes subjugated. A century later, Hamid Dalwai founded the Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal explicitly on Phule’s model, marched a handful of Muslim women to the Maharashtra Assembly to demand an end to triple talaq and polygamy, and was ostracised and abused for it. Neither man set out to comfort the pious. Both set out to unsettle them, because unsettling belief is what the reform of belief requires; it is not hard to imagine how a modern Section 299 complaint, or a Punjab-style sacrilege charge over their treatment of scripture and tradition, would read against language of that kind.
A law that criminalises the “deliberate and malicious” intention to outrage religious feeling, read honestly rather than sympathetically, does not obviously distinguish a Phule or a Dalwai from a bigot baiting a rival faith for sport: both are, in the plainest sense, trying to make believers feel bad about what they believe. What should separate them, in any society that values reform as much as it values sentiment, is whether the critic is trying to improve the community or merely humiliate it, a distinction that a police station taking down a complaint is poorly placed to draw. If Indian law wants the next Phule or the next Dalwai to be able to do their work, that shield needs to be built into the statute itself, rather than left to the hope that prosecutorial discretion, or an eventual acquittal years later, will do the job the law’s own language does not.
Limits of protection
Supporters of laws like Punjab’s have an argument, and it deserves to be engaged with rather than waved off. India is a country where religious sentiment has repeatedly proved combustible. A targeted law, applied with judicial restraint and the safeguard of proven intent, could in principle be a proportionate response to that risk rather than an assault on free thought.
The historical record of Section 295A, and now of Punjab’s own sacrilege law, gives little confidence that restraint is what actually happens in practice.
A secular Constitution that permits the state to imprison people for life over an insult to a book, however sacred, has conceded more ground to religious authority than its own founding principle allows. If India wishes to remain true to the secularism its Constitution declares unamendable, the honest path is to narrow these provisions to their original, defensible purpose: preventing incitement to actual violence, and leave the criticism, satire and reform of religious practice, however uncomfortable, to public argument rather than to the criminal courts.
