Punjab’s anti-sacrilege law doesn’t guarantee justice. What more needs to be done

The AAP govt has extracted more political capital from sacrilege accountability than any of its predecessors. It now has the opportunity — and the obligation — to match that rhetoric with performance in court.

A Sikh priest carries the Guru Granth Sahib, holy book of the Sikhs, on his head during a religious procession at the Golden Temple in Amritsar | Photo: ANI

On Monday, Punjab’s Vidhan Sabha met for a special session, passed an anti-sacrilege bill unanimously, and the political class promptly declared victory. That is the easy part done.

What follows is harder — and far less certain.

The Jaagat Jot Sri Guru Granth Sahib Satkar (Amendment) Bill, 2026 is not without significance. It acknowledges, at last, that the existing penal framework was unequal to the gravity of sacrilege offences. It signals — however belatedly — that the legislature will not treat the desecration of Sri Guru Granth Sahib, the living embodiment of the Guru for Sikhs worldwide, as an ordinary criminal matter. And it is a response, long overdue, to a decade of public anguish that has gone without institutional reckoning.

But acknowledgement is not justice. A signal is not a verdict. No amount of legislative ceremony can substitute for what Punjab has consistently failed to deliver: convictions.

First, the Governor must act

The Bill has cleared the Assembly. It is not yet law. The Governor has three constitutional options: assent, return for reconsideration, or reserve it for presidential consideration. The last opens the door to Article 254(2) protection — stronger constitutional armour for a state law on a Concurrent List subject — but at the cost of delay, uncertainty, and the political limbo that has swallowed Punjab’s earlier sacrilege-related legislation.

The Governor should assent, and promptly. There is no constitutional purpose served by delay that cannot be better addressed through parliamentary or judicial scrutiny once the law is in force.

There is, however, a structural limitation that deserves honest public acknowledgement. Even after assent, this law will run only within Punjab’s territorial limits. It will not apply in Chandigarh — the city that is Punjab’s capital but remains a Union Territory under central jurisdiction. Sacrilege in Chandigarh will continue to be governed by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS). That anomaly the state legislature cannot cure. Only parliament can.

The wall no rhetoric can breach

Here is what no one at the special session said clearly enough — and what the public deserves to hear without equivocation.

The new law cannot touch the old cases.

Article 20(1) of the Constitution bars retrospective penal operation. No person can be subjected to a law that did not exist when the offence was committed, or punished more severely than the law then prescribed. This is not a technicality. It is a foundational constitutional guarantee.

The Bargari sacrilege incidents that convulsed Punjab in 2015,  none of them will attract the enhanced punishment now on the statute book. The new law applies only to offences committed after it comes into force.

Politicians who have allowed their constituents to believe otherwise are either constitutionally illiterate or deliberately misleading. This Bill is not a retrospective sword of justice for 2015. It is a prospective deterrent for the future. That distinction matters enormously — not to diminish the legislation, but to prevent the false closure that it is already being deployed to manufacture.

The transferred cases and an underappreciated complication

Away from the theatre of the special session, two developments deserve more serious attention.

The Punjab Bureau of Investigation has issued a Standard Operating Procedure for sacrilege investigations — the first time Punjab has attempted a uniform investigative architecture for such offences. Evidence handling, scene protection, digital evidence standards, supervisory accountability: all now in a common framework. It sounds bureaucratic. It is foundational. Without standardised protocols, investigations produced evidentiary gaps that prosecution cases could not survive. Without an SOP, acquittal was almost structurally pre-ordained.

More urgently, the Kotkapura and Behbal Kalan police firing cases — the most explosive political legacy of 2015 — stand conclusively transferred from Faridkot to Chandigarh for sessions trial, to proceed separately but simultaneously. The forum dispute, itself a source of years of delay, is settled. Credit where it is due.

But here is the complication the government has not yet addressed publicly: Chandigarh is a Union Territory. Its prosecution machinery falls under the central government, not Punjab. That is a structural fault line, and a ready-made theatre for jurisdictional finger-pointing between an AAP state government and a BJP-led Centre. To forestall that entirely, Punjab must proactively approach the Punjab and Haryana High Court for the appointment of a senior advocate — of competence, integrity, and repute — as a court-appointed Special Public Prosecutor. An officer of the court, accountable only to the constitutional court, insulated from both state and central politics: that is the only arrangement capable of giving these trials the independence they demand.

What the AAP government owes Punjab

Kotkapura and Behbal Kalan are not routine sessions matters. They carry the full weight of institutional accountability: command responsibility, the lawful use of lethal force against civilian protesters, the conduct of senior police officers during acute civil disorder. The evidentiary architecture is complex. Political pressures on an ordinary prosecutor will be real. The risk of weak pairvi, adjournment-driven attrition, and diffused responsibility — the chronic diseases of Punjab’s criminal justice system — is not imaginary.

The AAP government has extracted more political capital from sacrilege accountability than any of its predecessors. It now has the opportunity — and the obligation — to match that rhetoric with performance in court. Punjab has seen enough of solemn legislative moments followed by courtroom collapse: high-decibel politics, dilatory prosecution, and acquittals that leave both accused and victims locked in a permanent unresolved grievance.

The sequence that will be judged

Punjab’s political class is already moving on, satisfied with the optics of unanimity. It should not be allowed to.

The sequence that will determine whether 13 April becomes a turning point — or another entry in Punjab’s long chronicle of deferred justice — is not complicated. The Governor must act promptly. The government must resist treating passage as closure. The public must be told plainly that Article 20(1) forecloses retrospective punishment. The SOP must be enforced with discipline. And Punjab must move the High Court for a court-appointed Special Public Prosecutor before the Chandigarh trials disappear into the familiar rot of jurisdictional politics and procedural drift.

Some pieces are finally in place: a passed law, a constitutional pathway, an investigative protocol, settled trial arrangements. These are not nothing. But Punjab has assembled pieces before — and watched them scatter.

The only question that will be remembered is whether this government has the seriousness of purpose to convert legislative gestures into judicial delivery.

The families of Behbal Kalan and Kotkapura have been waiting for over a decade not for speeches.

KBS Sidhu is a former IAS officer who retired as Special Chief Secretary, Punjab. He tweets @kbssidhu1961. Views are personal.

(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)