How Punjab Wrote a Life-Sentence Law Without Asking the President

The Statute Punjab Used to Avoid the President's Desk Article 254

gives the Centre a specific power: when a state law and a central law both genuinely legislate on the same Concurrent List subject and conflict, the state law is void unless it has received Presidential assent under Article 254(2).

What Article 254 does not reach is a state law that isn't actually amending the central statute at all - and that is the loophole Punjab's 2026 sacrilege law was built to use. In 2016 and 2018, Punjab tried the direct route twice: both bills sought to insert new provisions into the Indian Penal Code itself, prescribing life imprisonment for sacrilege against religious scriptures.

Both were criminal law amendments on a Concurrent List subject, both needed Presidential assent and both were returned by the Centre - the 2016 version because it protected only the Guru Granth Sahib, the 2018 version despite covering four scriptures.

In 2026, Punjab changed strategy entirely. Instead of touching the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, it amended a separate, pre-existing state law concerned narrowly with the ceremonial custody of the Guru Granth Sahib - a subject squarely within the state's own legislative competence.

Because the amendment is not, on its face, a Penal Code amendment, the government's argument is that Article 254 simply never gets triggered. The Governor's signature was enough.

Where the Workaround Runs Into Trouble

The petition now before the Punjab and Haryana High Court doesn't dispute that states can legislate on ceremonial matters - it disputes that a provision imposing life imprisonment is a ceremonial matter merely because of which statute book it sits in.

Criminal law is Concurrent List; the argument is that Article 254 looks at what a provision actually does, not what it's titled and a life sentence for a specific offence is criminal law by function regardless of the label on the amending Act.

Two further problems sit on top of this federal-competence question and they would exist even if the assent issue were resolved. The first is equality: by protecting only the Guru Granth Sahib, the law revives the objection that sank the 2016 bill - a provision needs an "intelligible differentia" bearing a "rational nexus" to its stated purpose, the test from *State of West Bengal v.

Anwar Ali Sarkar and singling out one faith's scripture sits uneasily with a law framed as protecting communal harmony generally. The second is proportionality: a mandatory life sentence with no judicial discretion to calibrate punishment to facts echoes Mithu v.

State of Punjab* (1983), where the Supreme Court struck down a different mandatory-sentencing provision on exactly this ground. What makes this case worth tracking beyond Punjab is the precedent a favourable ruling would set: any state wanting to avoid Article 254 scrutiny would have a template - legislate through an adjacent, functionally unrelated statute rather than amending the central code directly.

Whether the High Court accepts that a life sentence can be relabelled out of Concurrent List territory is the real question this case answers.