Should criticism of religion be fully protected free expression in India?

India does not have a blasphemy law in name, but several legal provisions function in similar ways, most notably Section 295A of the now-replaced Indian Penal Code (criminalising acts intended to outrage religious feelings), its successor under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, and IT Act provisions used against online religious speech. These are regularly invoked against commentary, art, and speech that criticises or mocks religious beliefs or figures. Critics argue enforcement is applied unevenly across religious communities and used to suppress legitimate expression.

Section 295A was originally introduced by the British colonial government in 1927, following communal tensions over a publication seen as insulting to a religious figure, and was intended to criminalise deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings. It has remained on the books through independence, and an equivalent provision was carried into the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which replaced the Indian Penal Code in 2023, alongside the separate replacement of the colonial sedition law with a new provision, Section 152, covering acts endangering sovereignty and unity.

In practice, these provisions have been used against journalists, comedians, artists, and ordinary citizens for content ranging from satire to academic commentary on religious texts and practices, across cases involving Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and other religious sensitivities, with rights groups documenting that enforcement intensity and selectivity vary significantly by case and by which community's sentiments are claimed to be hurt.

• Critics argue these provisions function as a de facto blasphemy law, despite India having no codified one, allowing prosecution for speech that causes offence rather than speech that causes demonstrable harm.
• Documented patterns of selective enforcement, where cases are pursued more readily against critics of dominant religious or political sentiment than against majority-community speech, raise equal-protection concerns.
• Strong free expression, including the right to criticise religious ideas and institutions, is widely treated as a core democratic freedom in comparative constitutional law, and supporters argue India should align more closely with that standard.

• Supporters of these provisions argue India's religious diversity and history of communal violence make some restriction on deliberately inflammatory religious speech a reasonable public order measure, not censorship for its own sake.
• The Indian Constitution itself permits reasonable restrictions on free speech, including in the interest of public order and decency, a textual basis supporters cite for these provisions' continued validity.
• Some argue the problem is not the existence of the law itself but inconsistent or politically motivated enforcement, which they say should be fixed through better implementation rather than removing the protection entirely.

Most Western liberal democracies have repealed or stopped enforcing blasphemy laws in recent decades; the United Kingdom abolished its common-law blasphemy offence in 2008, and several European countries have followed suit. Pakistan, by contrast, maintains and actively enforces strict blasphemy laws carrying severe penalties, including capital punishment in some cases, representing the opposite end of the spectrum from the post-blasphemy-law Western model. India's framework, formally secular but with religious-offence provisions that function similarly to blasphemy law in practice, sits between these two poles.

Cases under these provisions have been brought against critics across the political and religious spectrum, and no major national party has made full repeal of religious-offence provisions a prominent platform position. Civil liberties organisations and free speech advocates have been the most consistent voices for reform, while concerns about communal sensitivity and public order are cited across the political spectrum when specific cases arise involving their own community's religious sentiment.

This question sits firmly on the Authority axis, with a Tradition axis component: support for strong free expression protections, even for offensive religious speech, reads as libertarian, while support for restriction in the name of communal harmony reads as more state-protective.