The Punjab Anti-Sacrilege Law, 2026: The High Constitutional Costs of Legislating in Fear

On April 13, 2026, the Punjab Vidhan Sabha passed the Jaagat Jot Sri Guru Granth Sahib Satkar (Amendment) Act, 2026 in a special session—and that too unanimously, with the kind of cross-party consensus that rarely signals careful deliberation and almost always signals political expediency. The Act, subsequently notified in the Official Gazette, prescribes a minimum sentence of seven years and a maximum of twenty years, extendable to life imprisonment, along with a fine ranging from two to ten lakh rupees, for acts of sacrilege against the Saroops of Sri Guru Granth Sahib. The offence has been made cognisable, non-bailable, and non-compoundable. Investigation must be conducted by an officer of at least the rank of Deputy Superintendent of Police.

The political backdrop here is not difficult to read. The AAP government under Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann, approaching the final year of its first term, has chosen to address one of the most emotionally resonant issues in Sikh public life—the memory of which stretches most painfully to the 2015 Bargari desecrations in Faridkot, where over 110 torn pages of the Guru Granth Sahib were found strewn outside a gurdwara, triggering statewide protests that culminated in police firing at Behbal Kalan and Kotkapura, killing two protestors. That wound has not healed, and a decade later, the Bargari case remains substantially unresolved. Meanwhile, investigations have shifted among the CBI, multiple SITs, and state police, resulting in arrests but no conclusive convictions. The community has waited, and now the government has responded—with legislation.

Legislative History

The 2026 Amendment does not arrive in a vacuum. It is the third legislative attempt by the Punjab government to impose special criminal penalties for sacrilege of the Guru Granth Sahib. Understanding the prior attempts is essential to understanding why the present one is constitutionally suspect from the moment of its enactment.

In 2016, the then SAD-BJP government introduced a bill proposing the insertion of Section 295-AA into the Indian Penal Code, prescribing life imprisonment for sacrilege of the Guru Granth Sahib. The President returned the bill on the grounds that singling out one religion for special penal protection was constitutionally impermissible. In 2018, the Congress government sought to cure that defect by expanding the proposal to cover the Bhagavad Gita, the Holy Quran, and the Bible as well—to provide a veneer of religious equality. That bill, too, met with presidential disapproval, and with the coming into force of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) in 2023, the earlier legislative framework became even more complicated. In 2025, the AAP government introduced the Punjab Prevention of Crimes against Holy Scriptures Bill, 2025, which was referred to a Select Committee—a parliamentary device that, in this case, appears to have functioned more as a cooling chamber than a scrutiny mechanism.

The present Amendment emerged from that process and conspicuously reverted to protecting only the Guru Granth Sahib, abandoning even the formal equality of the 2018 approach. Two prior bills were turned back for being constitutionally impermissible, and the third narrows its scope further—using a public order statute, the parent Satkar Act, as its vehicle, rather than proposing direct criminal legislation.

The Constitutional Questions

The constitutional infirmities in the 2026 Amendment are not of one kind. They operate at three distinct levels, each capable of independently unravelling the legislation and, together, forming a challenge difficult to dismiss as merely technical: questions of legislative competence, which go to the very root of whether the Punjab legislature had the power to enact this law at all; questions of repugnancy, which go to whether, even if competent, the state law can survive alongside existing parliamentary legislation; and questions of vagueness, which go to whether the definition of the central offence meets the minimum constitutional standards of certainty that criminal law demands.

Legislative Competence

The parent Act, Jaagat Jot Sri Guru Granth Sahib Satkar Act, was a regulation of the supply and handling of Birs of the Guru Granth Sahib, traceable to Entry 1 of List II (public order) of the Seventh Schedule. The 2026 Amendment grafts onto this statute a wholly new criminal offence with substantial punishment. The question is whether a state legislature has the competence to create and punish this offence under the garb of an existing public order enactment.

The doctrine of pith and substance, articulated by the Supreme Court in A.S. Krishna v. State of Madras and Kartar Singh v. State of Punjab, requires the court to look past the legislative label and examine the true nature, object, and effect of the legislation (Krishna, 1957; Kartar Singh, 1994). In pith and substance, the 2026 Amendment is criminal law—it creates a new offence and prescribes significant punishment for it. Criminal law falls under Entries 1 and 2 of List III (the Concurrent List), on which Parliament has already comprehensively legislated through the BNS. Using a public order statute as the vehicle to introduce criminal law strongly suggests a colourable exercise of legislative power—achieving indirectly what preceding bills could not achieve directly, and what the President twice refused to assent to when it was proposed directly.

Repugnancy with the BNS

Even if legislative competence is granted, Article 254 of the Constitution provides that a state law on a Concurrent List subject is inoperative to the extent of repugnancy with a Parliamentary enactment, unless the state law has specifically received Presidential assent. The BNS already contains Sections 298, 299, and 302, which criminalise acts injuring or defiling places of worship and deliberately outraging religious feelings. The Supreme Court, in Innoventive Industries Ltd. v. ICICI Bank, reaffirmed that where a field is already occupied by central legislation, a state law operating in the same field is rendered inoperative to the extent of inconsistency (Innoventive Industries, 2018). The definition of “sacrilege” under Section 3(bb) of the Amendment, read with its punishment under Section 5, directly overlaps with BNS Sections 298–302. Unless Presidential assent was specifically obtained—which it was not in either of the previous two iterations and which is also not apparent here—the Amendment faces a credible repugnancy challenge.

Vagueness and Articles 14 and 19

The second limb of the Amendment's definition of “sacrilege” criminalises conduct through “visible representation, spoken or written words, or through electronic means” that hurts religious feelings. The Supreme Court in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India struck down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act—which penalised sending “grossly offensive” information—precisely because such formulations lack a determinate standard of application and therefore violate Articles 14 and 19(1)(a) (Shreya Singhal, 2015). In criminal law, the Court held, the act sought to be criminalised must be clearly and certainly defined. The phrase “hurt to religious feelings” admits no such clarity.

It is worth noting that in Ramji Lal Modi v. State of U.P., the Supreme Court upheld Section 295A of the IPC only on the very specific ground that it was restricted to deliberate and malicious acts with a direct tendency to disturb public order—a high, limiting threshold (Ramji Lal Modi, 1957). The 2026 Amendment does not replicate that construction in its statutory language. Without it, the provision is constitutionally exposed—wide enough to reach scholarly criticism, artistic commentary, or even academic inquiry into the Guru Granth Sahib's textual history if a complainant chooses to allege hurt feelings. That exposure cannot be considered hypothetical; it is the predictable consequence of imprecise drafting in a politically charged domain.

The Proportionality Problem

Proportionality in punishment is not a vague aspirational norm; it is a constitutional requirement recognised by the Supreme Court in Mithu v. State of Punjab and subsequently in Vikram Singh v. Union of India (Mithu, 1983; Vikram Singh, 2015). The question is whether the gravity of the offence warrants the severity of the sentence prescribed.

A mandatory minimum of seven years, rising to twenty years with the possibility of life imprisonment, places sacrilege of a religious scripture in the same sentencing bracket as rape under the BNS. It sits above the floor prescribed for terrorist offences under Section 15 of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, which sets the minimum at five years. In Vikram Singh, the Supreme Court upheld life imprisonment for kidnapping for ransom under Section 364A of the IPC on the specific ground that the offence had the potential to destabilise the nation when carried out by terrorist organisations. That is a qualitatively different threat register from the desecration of a religious text, however grave and however genuinely the community's outrage is felt.

The international comparison compounds the concern. The United Kingdom's Racial and Religious Hatred Act, 2006, enacted after abolishing the common law blasphemy offence, prescribes a maximum of seven years with no mandatory minimum for inciting religious hatred. Germany's Strafgesetzbuch, Section 166, punishes disturbance of the public peace by insulting religious communities with a maximum penalty of three years. Even Pakistan's Section 295-B of the Pakistan Penal Code, which criminalises defiling the Quran—a provision Amnesty International and the UN Human Rights Council have condemned for systematic misuse—prescribes life imprisonment as a ceiling, not as an alternative to a mandatory minimum floor. Punjab's 2026 Amendment, with a mandatory minimum of seven years, is more punitive in its entry-level sentence than Pakistan's already-condemned sacrilege legislation. That is not a comparison any legislature ought to be comfortable sitting with.

Safeguards and Structural Deficiency

Section 217 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita requires prior government sanction before a court takes cognisance of an offence under Section 299 of the BNS (outraging religious feelings). This requirement interposes an institutional filter between a private complainant and criminal prosecution, allowing the executive to screen out frivolous or motivated complaints before they snowball into FIRs, arrests, and extended pre-trial detention. The 2026 Amendment contains no such equivalent requirement.

The offence is cognisable—the police may arrest without a warrant. It is non-bailable, which does not mean the accused has no access to bail whatsoever, but that bail is not a matter of right; it falls entirely at the discretion of the court, and in practice, for an offence carrying a minimum of seven years, that discretion is rarely exercised generously at the trial court or sessions court stage. It is non-compoundable; even if both parties reach an understanding, the courts cannot compound the matter. For someone falsely accused, this architecture is catastrophic. The absence of any pre-cognisance sanction requirement means there is no institutional gate between the allegation and the arrest. With bail discretionary rather than assured, the accused may spend considerable time in custody before any court seriously examines whether the accusation had merit in the first place.

Amnesty International, in its foundational analysis of Pakistan's blasphemy provisions, identified the absence of pre-cognisance screening and the availability of warrantless arrest as the two structural features most responsible for systematic abuse of those laws (Amnesty International, 2016). Pakistan's own Law Commission, as far back as 1994, expressed concern that precisely these gaps facilitated the misuse of blasphemy provisions. The 2026 Amendment embeds both gaps into Punjab's law. The DSP-level investigation requirement is a thin safeguard—anyone familiar with how police forces function under local political and social pressure in Punjab understands why a rank requirement does not insulate an investigation from communal or electoral bias.

The Asia Bibi case is the most globally recognised illustration. A Christian woman accused of insulting the Prophet during a dispute over a sip of water with Muslim coworkers spent nearly a decade on death row. When the Supreme Court of Pakistan finally acquitted her in 2018, Punjab's Governor Salman Taseer had already been assassinated in January 2011 by his own bodyguard for publicly advocating her release—and his killer was garlanded by supporters outside the courthouse. The structural lesson is not that Pakistan is uniquely broken. The lesson is that blasphemy-style legislation without safeguards, enforced by local police under social and political pressure, with no penalty for false accusation, produces exactly this pattern: the weakest person in the room becomes the most obvious target.

The European Parliament, in its Resolution B9-0256/2021, noted that Pakistan's own Supreme Court had acknowledged that “the majority of blasphemy cases are based on false accusations” driven by ulterior motives, and urged repeal of Sections 295-B and 295-C (European Parliament, 2021). The UN Human Rights Committee, in General Comment No. 34 on Article 19 of the ICCPR, has stated that blasphemy laws are incompatible with the Covenant when used to suppress criticism of religious doctrine (UNHRC, 2011). These are not Western impositions. They are the conclusions of the very judicial and international institutions Pakistan itself has had to contend with.

The Global Retreat from Blasphemy Law

While Punjab enacts stricter religion-specific criminal legislation, the international legislative trend runs in the opposite direction. The Netherlands abolished its blasphemy law in 2014; Iceland and Norway followed in 2015; Malta in 2016; France in 2017; Denmark in 2017; Ireland, whose constitution had embedded a blasphemy offence since 1937, amended it by public referendum in 2018 and formally repealed the statutory law in 2020.

The United Kingdom abolished blasphemy as a common law offence in England and Wales in 2008, replacing it with the content-neutral Racial and Religious Hatred Act, which protects individuals from incitement of hatred rather than protecting doctrines or scriptures from criticism—and requires proof of intent to stir up hatred, a significantly higher evidential threshold. The Venice Commission and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe have recommended the abolition of blasphemy offences across member states, drawing a principled and now widely accepted distinction: protecting individuals from targeted hatred is legitimate; protecting religious texts or doctrines from criticism or disrespect is incompatible with Articles 9 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (Venice Commission, 2010).

The OSCE's free expression rapporteurs, alongside their counterparts at the United Nations and the Organisation of American States, have jointly stated that laws restricting expression “should never be used to protect particular institutions, or abstract notions, concepts or beliefs, including religious ones” (Joint Declaration on Defamation of Religions, 2008). These frameworks do not bind India. But the direction of movement matters: the world's established democracies are arriving, through hard experience, at the conclusion that scripture-specific criminal laws are structurally prone to misuse and constitutionally incompatible with free expression guarantees. Punjab is moving in the opposite direction in 2026, with greater sentencing severity and fewer procedural safeguards than most of the legislation these democracies abolished a decade ago.

The Way Forward

There is a well-established principle in penological scholarship, articulated most foundationally by Cesare Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishments (1764) and consistently supported by contemporary criminological research: the deterrent effect of criminal law derives primarily from the certainty of punishment rather than its quantum (Beccaria, 1764). A potential offender who believes he will not be caught is undeterred by the length of the sentence he will never serve. The failure in Punjab's sacrilege cases has not been legislative leniency—it has been investigative inadequacy, prosecutorial delay, and the near-total absence of conviction: structural failures that no enhancement of sentence can remedy.

Bargari has been pending for a decade. That fact alone should have been the starting point of this legislative exercise—not an inconvenience to be legislated around.

The more constitutionally defensible and practically effective response would have worked within the existing framework of Section 299 of the BNS, directing reform at the machinery of investigation and prosecution rather than at the sentencing tariff. This would mean:

• Mandatory time-bound sanction under Section 217 BNSS where prima facie evidence is established
• Appointment of experienced special public prosecutors dedicated to sacrilege trials
• Day-to-day conduct of proceedings with judicial accountability for unexplained delays
• Institutional consequences for investigating officers in whose hands prosecutable cases disintegrate
• A statutory penalty for false accusation that rebalances the asymmetry the current Amendment leaves entirely unaddressed

These are unglamorous reforms. They do not lend themselves to press conferences or Assembly speeches. But they are the reforms that produce convictions—and a conviction, lawfully obtained, after a rigorous investigation and a fair trial, is what the community has been denied since 2015. Legislation that prescribes life imprisonment while leaving the investigative and prosecutorial infrastructure unreformed is not a response to that denial. It is a substitution for one.

Conclusion

The reverence the Sikh community holds for the Guru Granth Sahib is not in question, and neither is the legitimate demand for legal accountability when that reverence is violated. What is in question is whether this Amendment, as constructed, is capable of delivering that accountability—or whether it will deliver something else entirely.

The comparative record is not encouraging. Pakistan's blasphemy legislation was enacted in the name of protecting a faith. What it produced, in practice, was Asia Bibi, the assassination of Salman Taseer, and a prosecutorial record that Pakistan's own Supreme Court characterised as overwhelmingly driven by personal vendetta and motivated complaint rather than genuine religious harm. Europe's progressive abandonment of scripture-protection law over the past two decades was not an act of irreverence—it reflected a considered legal conclusion that criminal law is an instrument for protecting persons from harm, not for insulating doctrines or texts from contestation, and that broad, vague offence definitions in the hands of local enforcement agencies reliably produce discrimination rather than justice.

Punjab's own legislative history carries the same warning. Section 295A of the IPC was itself a product of the communal tensions surrounding the Rangila Rasul controversy of the 1920s, where legislation was enacted under pressure—which the Supreme Court ultimately upheld only on the narrow ground that it was confined to deliberate and malicious acts with a direct tendency to disturb public order. Remove that limiting construction, and the provision becomes what the 2026 Amendment already is: an open-textured offence waiting to be deployed.

A legislature that is serious about protecting the sanctity of the Guru Granth Sahib would have begun with Bargari—asking why, after ten years and the full machinery of the state, no one has been convicted. It would have built legislation around that failure: strengthening investigations, securing prosecutions, and ensuring that, where evidence exists, it is followed to a conclusion. Instead, the Punjab Vidhan Sabha has enhanced the sentence for an offence it has never successfully proved. That is not a response to impunity. The High Court, and in all likelihood the Supreme Court, will be asked to assess whether it is even constitutionally permissible.