When "Public Order" Becomes a Permanent Alibi for Policing Belief

The Oldest Trick in the Secular State's Book

A Question Older Than the Word "Secular" In 399 BCE, an

Athenian jury convicted Socrates of asebeia, impiety and sentenced him to death. The formal charge was not "Socrates holds unorthodox religious views we find offensive." It was that he corrupted the young and endangered the city's stability at a moment when Athens, recently defeated and politically fragile, was anxious about internal disorder.

The vocabulary of civic danger did the work that a bare admission, "we are punishing a man for what he believes," could never have done. Twenty-three centuries later, colonial India enacted Section 295A not, on its own official account, to shield the Prophet or any scripture from criticism, but to prevent the kind of communal violence that followed the Rangila Rasul pamphlet.

The vocabulary was different: "public order" instead of civic danger. The function was identical.

Two Cases, One Mechanism

What connects Socrates' Athens to India's statute book is not that both societies punished blasphemy, plenty of societies have done that honestly and openly. What connects them is that neither state was willing to say so plainly.

Each reached for a justification about order, stability or safety, precisely because "we are punishing belief" is not a claim a state built on reasoned government, however imperfectly, can make without conceding it has abandoned its own foundations.

The public order alibi is not a coincidence of translation across centuries; it is the specific move a state makes when it wants the effect of a blasphemy law without owning the label.

Where the Alibi Runs Out Punjab's 2026

sacrilege law is instructive precisely because it drops this pretence. Its definition extends beyond physical desecration to words, signs and electronic representations that merely hurt religious feelings, with no operative requirement that the expression in question actually threaten public disorder.

The alibi that carried Section 295A through nearly a century of constitutional scrutiny, that this is about preventing riots, does not fit a provision that criminalises private hurt feelings regardless of whether any disorder is imminent.

When a law finally says what earlier laws only implied, protecting belief rather than order, it exposes how much work "public order" was always doing to make the underlying project acceptable.

The Real Choice

A secular republic does not actually have to choose between two coherent positions, protect order or protect belief, if it is honest about which one it is doing. What it cannot do and what both Athens and India show it will be tempted to do anyway, is borrow the vocabulary of the first to disguise its practice of the second.

The measure of a mature secular democracy is not whether it ever restricts speech about religion; reasonable restrictions can be defended on their own terms. It is whether it can name, without euphemism, exactly what it is restricting and why, rather than reaching for "public order" as a permanent, infinitely elastic alibi that survives however far the underlying law drifts from actually preventing disorder.