Punjab's New Sacrilege Law and India's Century-Old Blasphemy Problem

A Law India's Old Coloniser Already Abandoned In September 1927, the Central Legislative

Assembly enacted Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, a provision drafted specifically to criminalise "deliberate and malicious" insult to religious belief by words, signs or visible representation. It arrived nineteen months too late to prevent the murder that had, in part, prompted it - the Lahore publisher Mahashe Rajpal was stabbed to death in April 1929 by a young carpenter avenging a pamphlet Rajpal had printed about the Prophet Muhammad's marriages.

Nearly a century later, in April 2026, Punjab's Assembly wrote a new chapter of the same law: the amended Jaagat Jot Sri Guru Granth Sahib Satkar Act, which criminalises sacrilege against the Guru Granth Sahib with sentences up to life imprisonment.

Same Law, Different Century

What makes Punjab's law worth pausing on is not the punishment, but the definition. Sacrilege, historically, means physical violation - burning, defacing or stealing a sacred object, closer in law to trespass than to speech.

Blasphemy means something else entirely - contemptuous words or imagery about belief itself. Section 298 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita punishes the first; Section 299 (the old 295A) punishes the second. Punjab's Act, in its own text, does both at once: it covers physical desecration of the Saroop, but it equally covers acts "by words, either spoken or written or by signs or by visible representations or through electronic means." The 1927 pattern - public order used to justify policing belief itself - has not just repeated.

It has been written into a single sentence.

Where the Parallel Breaks Here is

where the comparison actually matters for an aspirant, because a parallel that holds everywhere is usually lazy. In 1927, England had not yet moved; India's colonial administrators and India's own legislators (including a Select Committee that Muhammad Ali Jinnah sat on) built 295A as a compromise and Jinnah himself insisted on protecting "bona fide and honest criticism of a religion." In 2008, England and Wales abolished common law blasphemy altogether; Scotland followed in 2021, in force from 2024.

India kept the provision, folded it into the BNS as Section 299 in 2024 and Punjab has now made its own version of the underlying idea more severe, not less. The country that exported this legal category to India has spent nearly two decades dismantling it.

India is doing the opposite in real time. The 2007 arrest of Karnataka editor B.V. Seetaram - over newspaper articles questioning Digambara Jain monks' practice of public nudity, with nothing physically defiled - shows how easily an expressive complaint under 295A-type law escalates into custody.

Punjab's law now builds that same escalation risk directly into its definition of "sacrilege," using the vocabulary of conduct to authorise the policing of opinion. For an aspirant, the exam-relevant insight is not that India has religious offence laws - that much is textbook.

It is that the specific mechanism by which "public order" gets used to justify silencing expression has a traceable, nameable history, one that keeps resurfacing in new statutory clothing every time a state legislature decides communal hurt needs a stronger remedy than debate.