I n 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.
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. The chilling effect happens at the point of complaint, not at the point of conviction.
The Constitution declares secularism part of its “basic structure,” and a law of this kind sits awkwardly against that declaration. 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.
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. 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.
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.
In 2007, the Karnataka editor B.V. 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. 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. 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. 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. In 2016, the then Akali Dal-BJP government passed a bill imposing life imprisonment for sacrilege committed specifically against the Guru Granth Sahib. 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.
The line is real, but it does not always survive contact with how these laws are enforced. 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. The pamphlet did not appear out of nowhere: it was written, on the evidence of Dr. B.R. Rajpal was prosecuted under Section 153A, the general provision against promoting enmity between communities. 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. The law arrived too late to touch the original pamphlet, and it did not, in the event, prevent what came next. Jinnah himself argued Ilm-ud-din’s unsuccessful appeal against the death sentence; he was executed that October. Punjab’s journey towards a codified sacrilege law illustrates how these pressures play out at the State level. The Centre returned it, objecting that a law protecting only one religion’s scripture could not sit easily with India’s secular Constitution. That Bill, too, was returned without Presidential assent.
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. 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.
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.
