5 min readApr 21, 2026 07:05 AM IST
First published on: Apr 21, 2026 at 06:14 AM IST
In April 1929, a 19-year-old carpenter walked into a publisher’s shop in Lahore, pulled out a knife, and stabbed the man behind the counter. The publisher died on the spot. Had this been an ordinary crime, history would have forgotten him entirely. But Malhotra was no ordinary victim, and Ilm Din was no ordinary killer. Malhotra had published a book about the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) deemed deeply offensive to Muslims, was tried in court and acquitted, enraging large sections of Muslims across colonial Punjab. When Ilm Din was arrested, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, persuaded by Allama Iqbal, entered the case at the appeal stage as defence counsel. The Lahore High Court was unmoved. Ilm Din was hanged.
History rarely constructs its ironies so precisely. Among those who led Ilm Din’s funeral procession was a progressive poet, Muhammad Din Taseer, broadly sympathetic to the Muslim grievance. Decades later, in 2011, his son Salman Taseer, serving as governor of Pakistani Punjab, would himself be killed by his bodyguard for speaking out in the name of the same cause, against Pakistan’s blasphemy law. There is a footnote worth recording. By a remarkable symmetry, Malhotra’s son Surendra Nath went on to serve as governor of Indian Punjab, while Taseer’s son governed Pakistani Punjab.
Almost 50 years later, again in the month of April, as if the Subcontinent runs on a grim seasonal calendar, a group of Sikhs upset at Nirankari chief Gurbachan Singh arrived at his headquarters in Punjab. The confrontation turned violent. Thirteen Sikhs and three Nirankaris were killed, setting Punjab on a spiral of bloodshed that would consume the state and the nation for two decades. The lesson Punjab never learned is the same one that Punjab’s new anti-sacrilege law ignores. Laws passed without institutional discipline do not resolve religious grievances. They institutionalise them. A century on, we are still grappling with the same unresolved question. Where does religious grievance end, and the law begin?
When colonial administrators found themselves unable to convict Malhotra under existing law, Section 295-A was inserted into the Indian Penal Code in 1927, criminalising deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage the religious feelings of any class. The Punjab of 2026 is grappling with something more visceral: Sacrilege. The physical violation of the sacred itself. The question is whether the law can channel that fury, or is designed to divert attention from a government that failed to address it for four years running. With elections due in 2027, it arrives not as a considered legislative remedy but as a political manoeuvre. If AAP was genuinely committed to addressing sacrilege, it had four years to demonstrate that commitment. It did not. When the Punjab Police SIT sought approval to proceed against accused persons under Section 295-A, that approval took two-and-a-half years to arrive. Of 597 sacrilege cases recorded across the last decade, convictions were secured in only 44.
One genuine advance deserves acknowledgement. The Punjab Police have issued a unified investigative protocol for sacrilege cases, covering forensic handling and digital evidence certification. But procedure cannot compensate for a law that lacks safeguards. A law with punitive teeth but no conscience hands that machinery to whoever files the first complaint. In a country as vast and religiously diverse as India, where faith runs deep and grievance runs faster, a fabricated video depicting desecration can inflame an entire district before anyone has verified whether the footage is real. The law must be able to respond. But the question is never whether to have guardrails, it is whether they will protect people, or become weapons in the hands of those they were designed to restrain.
Pakistan offers the most sobering answer. Before 1986, fewer than 15 blasphemy cases had ever been registered. Three decades later, the number stood at over 1,500. Since 1990, 62 people have been murdered over such allegations. Organised criminal networks have been documented filing false complaints to extort money from the families of the accused, a pattern documented by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. Under Pakistani law, there is little or no prosecution for filing a false blasphemy allegation. India need not travel Pakistan’s road. But this law offers the same combination that has always proved lethal. Genuine religious sentiment, legislative haste, political calculation, and an absence of safeguards. This is not legislation. It is electioneering in legal clothing.
The writer is former finance minister of Punjab
