It is important, at the outset, to be precise about what the debate around sacrilege legislation in Punjab is all about. What is actually being legislated raises a question that liberal political philosophy has never satisfactorily resolved. Understandably, no one is legislating reverence, and as it is, reverence cannot be legislated. What is being necessitated by newly assertive religious voices in the state is a criminal law that seeks to impose imprisonment for acts of desecration or blasphemy against Guru Granth Sahib.
Clearly, reverence is a condition of the inner life, of what a childhood spent in intimate familiarity with Guru Granth Sahib imperceptibly and irrevocably instils. No law can produce that reverence and no law could have. The distinction matters enormously.
This is not an abstract question for me. Growing up, we as children were drawn into the world of Sikhism not through instruction or obligation but through something far more powerful. Our mother would gather us around her and read aloud stories of Guru Nanak from his Janamsakhis, pausing often to explain a relevant stanza, its meaning, its texture, its significance to the life we were living. The reverence that formed in us was entirely spontaneous, born of understanding rather than compulsion or fear.
The sacred stories were simply ours, along with Guru Granth Sahib that sat in our homes and gurdwaras the way a beloved elder sits with weight and sturdy authority. Our journeys through a landscape of gurdwaras became, over the years, a part of the architecture of our growing. Each visit deepened a familiarity that was never ceremonial, never anxious, never held in place by the shadow of legal consequence. Guru Granth Sahib was a living presence, encountered with fearless intimacy that comes only when a text has genuinely entered one’s inner being. That fearlessness was itself a form of respect, deeper, I would argue, than anything a blasphemy law could produce. That reverence was unlegislated. It arose from somewhere interior.
Which is why laws criminalising the desecration of Guru Granth Sahib trouble me in a way that is difficult to name at first, and then becomes very easy to spell out. The assumption is that desecration is possible. That a human hand, a careless or a cruel act, can diminish what is eternal. But if you believe in the sanctity of the Granth, then you must also believe it is beyond harm. The Word does not require the law’s protection. It never did.
It is from this experience that my reflections arise. The demand for legislation on blasphemy conflates two things that must be kept distinct: the legitimate collective hurt caused by deliberate desecration, and the very different question of whether criminal penalty is the appropriate response to it. One can treat the former seriously without conceding the latter. And it is that distinction between honouring what is sacred and legislating against its violation through fear that the debate in Punjab requires us to examine.
The problem is not incidental. It goes to the heart of what religion essentially claims to be doing. Let us look at Sikhism and Buddhism, the two traditions that share a profound orientation towards interiority and emerge from premises that sit in a complex relationship with doctrinal coercion.
The Buddha’s epistemological injunction, preserved in the Kalama Sutta, insists that truth cannot be inherited or imposed through institutional fiat. It must be tested against experience, verified through practice, realised in the depths of individual consciousness. Tradition places the burden of understanding on the individual and refuses to sacralise any object or institution beyond the reach of inquiry.
Sikhism begins in a register that shares certain deep affinities with this orientation. The Gurus privilege Naam, ethical conduct and contemplative discipline over ritualism, formalism and the mere performance of belief. The divine in Sikh theology is not external or remote; it is immanent and accessible through reflection and grace. The Shabad, the Word, is not simply an object to be defended but a living truth to be realised through sustained engagement. In this theological register, the relationship between external acts and inner spiritual reality is one that the tradition has asked its followers to reflect upon.
And yet, Sikhism does not remain within a purely contemplative frame, nor should one expect it to. Its historical evolution produced a distinct institutional and shared identity, anchored in Guru Granth Sahib as a living Guru, and not merely a repository of wisdom but the living focal point of collective devotion, authority and continuity. This is not incidental but constitutive of our Sikh tradition, in which the scripture is a symbol of collective survival, a condensation of historical memory and dignity accumulated through centuries of immense sacrifice and resistance. To treat acts of deliberate desecration as merely symbolic offences, without social or legal consequence, would be to misread both the phenomenology of religious community and the specific historical vulnerabilities of the Sikh experience.
To acknowledge this fully is not to settle the question of legislation. It is to understand the conditions that give rise to the demand for it. The push for stricter sacrilege laws in Punjab must emerge from history, from asking whether the lived experience of a community has found its most sacred symbols repeatedly targeted in contexts of political destabilisation. What is being debated, therefore, is not theology in isolation. It is memory, collective dignity and the question of whether certain forms of targeted desecration constitute a form of emotional hurt that the law has an obligation to address.
However, while nearly every religious tradition seeks legal protection against acts perceived as desecration, such laws cannot become instruments of securing favour with a religious community. Reverence can never be legislated into existence, nor can faith be placed under perpetual surveillance by the state or by self-appointed guardians of religious sentiment. The question of whether every individual possesses the “proper" degree of respect for Guru Granth Sahib cannot be adjudicated through punitive law without producing an atmosphere of fear, suspicion and vigilantism.
India’s legal framework contains provisions to address acts that deliberately inflame communal tensions or wound religious sentiments. To go beyond this and to encourage a politics of continuous vigilance around sacrilege risks transforming a deeply personal and spiritual relation of reverence into a public regime of coercion and fear.
This is precisely where the philosophical complexity becomes most demanding. Law operates through coercion. Reverence, by contrast, is at its most meaningful when it is freely given, arising from genuine understanding rather than external compulsion. The question that political philosophers and theologians have long grappled with is whether these two registers, the legal and the devotional, can be aligned without one compromising the other. It is a question without easy resolution, and one that the tradition itself, with its emphasis on inner realisation, places before us with particular force. The question, thus, is how that tension is best handled, and whether criminal law is the appropriate instrument for doing so.
