BLASPHEMY, AMBEDKAR AND THE POLITICS OF MEANING
From the Isha Upanishad to Partition, Nupur Sharma, the Aligarh Muslim University Case, the Gayatri Litigation, and the Subaltern
I. Introduction: The Interpretive Question Behind Blasphemy
Blasphemy is conventionally described as an insult offered to God, a deity, a prophet, scripture, or religious belief. Framed this way, the problem appears theological. But beneath the theological surface lies a distinctly constitutional question: who is entitled to decide what counts as an insult in the first place? Meaning is never self-evident. A sentence acquires significance only through language, context, intention, audience and interpretation. When the State is asked to criminally punish an allegedly blasphemous utterance, it is not merely policing religious sentiment — it is being drawn into a contest over interpretive authority. Blasphemy law, in other words, is as much about who controls meaning as it is about religion.
This article examines that constitutional problem through six lenses: the doctrinal test laid down by the Supreme Court in 1957 on the constitutionality of Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, 1860; the philosophical distinction between sacred belief and interpretive ownership drawn from the Isha Upanishad; Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s analysis of communal identity in Pakistan or the Partition of India; the Nupur Sharma controversy of 2022; the Supreme Court’s 2024 judgment on the minority status of Aligarh Muslim University; the 2025 Allahabad High Court litigation concerning a book on the Gayatri Mantra; and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s theory of subalternity. Read together, these strands converge on a single constitutional proposition: religious identity may generate a legitimate claim to protection from hatred, but it does not generate a claim to sovereignty over meaning.
II. The Constitutional Balance: Article 19(1)(a) and Articles 25–26
The Constitution of India awards no absolute victory to either religion or speech. Article 19(1)(a) guarantees freedom of speech and expression, subject to the reasonable restrictions permitted under Article 19(2). Articles 25 and 26 guarantee freedom of conscience and the right to profess, practise and propagate religion, but expressly subordinate that freedom to public order, morality, health, and the other provisions of Part III. The constitutional design is one of calibrated balance rather than hierarchy: a citizen cannot invoke religious belief to render every critical or unwelcome statement unlawful, and equally, freedom of speech does not extend constitutional cover to expression deliberately and maliciously directed at outraging the religious feelings of a community. The constitutional task is therefore to distinguish criticism from hatred, offence from legally cognisable harm, and dissent from incitement — a task Indian jurisprudence has approached principally through Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 (now substantially re-enacted as Section 299 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023).
III. Ramji Lal Modi and the Doctrine of Deliberate Malice
The constitutional validity of Section 295A was tested early in the Republic’s history in Ramji Lal Modi v. State of U.P., 1957 SCC OnLine SC 77 . The petitioner was the editor, printer and publisher of a cow-protection magazine, Gaurakshak, which had carried a 1952 article held to have deliberately offended the religious sentiments of the Muslim community of Uttar Pradesh. Convicted by the Sessions Judge, Kanpur, and sentenced to rigorous imprisonment — a sentence reduced on appeal to the Allahabad High Court — the petitioner approached the Supreme Court under Article 32, challenging the constitutionality of Section 295A itself on the ground that it exceeded the restrictions permissible under Article 19(2).
A Constitution Bench presided over by Chief Justice S.R. Das upheld Section 295A. The Court held that the provision did not penalise every act that caused religious offence; its operation was confined to acts done with a “deliberate and malicious intention” to outrage the religious feelings of a class of citizens, and this narrow tailoring — aimed at acts having a calculated tendency to disrupt public order — brought the provision within the protection of Article 19(2
The significance of the “deliberate and malicious intention” requirement is not merely historical. If subjective offence alone were treated as the legal test, the criminal law would come to depend on the loudest or most easily mobilised claimant of injury, and constitutional freedom would become hostage to the intensity of another person’s objection. By insisting on intention and calculated tendency rather than mere hurt sentiment, Ramji Lal Modi (Supra) keeps the criminal law anchored to conduct rather than to the subjective reaction of the offended listener — a distinction that recurs, in far more difficult circumstances, in the Nupur Sharma controversy discussed in Part VII below.
IV. Sacred Possession and the Isha Upanishad
The philosophical problem underlying blasphemy law becomes sharper when approached through the Isha Upanishad, whose opening verse describes the divine as pervading everything that moves in this moving world (Īśāvāsya idam sarvam). That conception of the sacred as all-encompassing offers a striking counterpoint to possessiveness. The sacred may be experienced as intensely personal — a believer’s relationship with a deity, scripture or symbol can be the deepest thing in that person’s life — but the philosophical idea of the sacred need not, for that reason, become anyone’s private property. Faith can be possessed without meaning being possessed. A relationship of devotion does not, without more, confer a legal monopoly over every interpretation of the object of that devotion.
This distinction matters for constitutional democracy because the problem of possession becomes political the moment religious identity is converted into a claim of authority. To say “this is sacred to me” is to exercise conscience. To say “therefore nobody may interpret it differently” is to assert power over others. The first belongs naturally within the guarantee of religious freedom under Articles 25 and 26; the second requires independent constitutional justification, because it asks the State to enforce one community’s or one individual’s reading of a text or symbol against all others. A democratic State can protect the right to believe without becoming the theological guardian of belief. The moment it does the latter, it ceases to protect religious freedom and begins to administer religious orthodoxy — a role the Constitution nowhere assigns to it.
V. Ambedkar, Partition, and the Territorialisation of Identity
Dr B.R. Ambedkar makes this problem of identity and authority unavoidable. In Pakistan or the Partition of India (first published 1940, revised 1945; reproduced in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, Vol. 8, Government of Maharashtra), Ambedkar confronted the political consequences of Hindu-Muslim communal division with considerable directness. He examined the Muslim League’s demand for a separate state, the Hindu political response, the available constitutional alternatives, the mechanics of representation, and the eventual possibility of territorial separation. The work contains severe, and at points sweeping, observations about Muslim political attitudes of the period. Those passages should be neither concealed nor selectively weaponised; they are best read as historical and political argument emerging from the constitutional crisis of late colonial India, not as timeless theological commentary on Islam.
This invites an uncomfortable question: was Ambedkar Islamophobic? The answer calls for historical and conceptual precision rather than a slogan. If Islamophobia is understood as hostility to Muslims because they are Muslims, then particular passages of Ambedkar’s writing can legitimately be subjected to contemporary criticism on that ground. But to reduce Pakistan or the Partition of India to an attack on Islam as a religion would misread its central concern, which was the political relationship between communities and the constitutional consequences of competing claims to nationhood and representation. Ambedkar’s work can therefore be criticised where the criticism is warranted, without being simplified into either hagiography or condemnation.
Partition supplies a historical warning about what happens when religious identity is allowed to convert into territorial sovereignty. Ambedkar’s analysis was concerned with whether communities divided by profound political and social difference could sustain a common constitutional framework; Partition eventually answered that question by converting a dispute over communal identity into a dispute over territory. The lesson for blasphemy law is not that religion causes Partition, nor that the two phenomena are identical — the claim is narrower and more precise. Partition territorialised political identity. Blasphemy controversies, left unchecked by principled constitutional limits, can territorialise meaning: a community moves from asserting “this belief is sacred to us” to asserting “therefore we alone may determine what may be said about it.” That transformation is constitutionally significant, because neither minority protection nor majority status logically produces interpretive sovereignty. The Constitution protects citizens and communities; it does not appoint any religious community as the sovereign owner of language, history or ideas.
VI. Islam, Muslims, and the Discipline of Distinction
A workable constitutional approach to religious offence depends on holding apart two things that public debate constantly collapses into one another: the religion as a body of doctrine, history and symbol, and the community of believers as citizens bearing constitutional rights. Islam, like any religion, is a legitimate subject of theology, history and criticism. Muslims are citizens entitled to equal protection and to freedom from hatred directed at them as a class. Criticism of Islamic doctrine is not, without more, hostility toward Muslims; equally, hostility toward Muslims cannot be laundered into acceptability merely by describing itself as “criticism of Islam.” The same principle applies with equal force to every other religion practised in India, including Hinduism. If Muslims are protected from hatred because they are Muslims, Hindus must receive equal protection because they are Hindus; if criticism of Islamic doctrine is permissible within constitutional limits, criticism of Hindu doctrine must be equally permissible. The Constitution does not create, and cannot be read to create, a hierarchy of sacredness or differing thresholds of intellectual freedom depending on which religion is being discussed. Constitutional equality requires symmetry of treatment across faiths.
VII. The Nupur Sharma Controversy: Speech, Process and Public Memory
The Nupur Sharma episode brought the theoretical problem of religious offence into the centre of contemporary Indian public life. On 26 May 2022, Nupur Sharma, then a national spokesperson of the Bharatiya Janata Party, made remarks concerning the Prophet Muhammad during a televised debate on Times Now. The remarks generated nationwide controversy and multiple FIRs across several States, invoking, among other provisions, Sections 153A and 295A of the Indian Penal Code. The controversy widened well beyond the original broadcast to encompass questions of public order, political accountability, the conduct of televised debate, and the limits of permissible speech — a few minutes of television talk transformed into competing narratives about religion, law and citizenship, and, tragically, was invoked in connection with the killing of a tailor in Udaipur in June 2022.
The Supreme Court’s engagement with these events proceeded in stages, and the distinctions between them matter. On 1 July 2022, a Bench of Justices Surya Kant and J.B. Pardiwala declined to entertain Sharma’s plea seeking the clubbing and quashing of the multiple FIRs, and made strong oral observations describing her as having “set the entire country on fire” with her “loose tongue”; the petition was thereafter withdrawn. On 19 July 2022, on a fresh application citing credible threats to her life, the same Bench granted interim protection from coercive action in respect of existing and future FIRs/complaints on the same subject-matter. On 10 August 2022, in N.V. Sharma v. Union of India, 2022 SCC OnLine SC 1003, the Court directed that all FIRs against Sharma, present and future, arising from the same broadcast be transferred and clubbed for investigation with the Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations (IFSO) Unit of the Delhi Police, declined the State of West Bengal’s request for a court-monitored Special Investigation Team, and granted Sharma liberty to approach the Delhi High Court for quashing of the FIRs. A materially similar transfer order was later passed in respect of FIRs against the news anchor who had hosted the debate.
The subsequent treatment of the multiple FIRs illustrates the difference between substantive guilt and procedural fairness. Consolidating the investigation before a single specialised agency did not amount to a declaration that the underlying speech was lawful; it rested on the distinct constitutional proposition, well established in this Court’s jurisprudence against successive FIRs on the same cause of action, that a person accused of unlawful speech nonetheless remains entitled to a fair and non-duplicative legal process. That entitlement cannot depend on whether the public approves of the accused or is scandalised by the accusation.
This episode also demonstrates why oral observations, submissions, and operative orders must be kept analytically distinct. The Bench’s remarks on 1 July 2022 were forceful and were reported and repeated as though they were formal findings of guilt; strictly, they were oral observations made in the course of declining to entertain an application, not an adjudication on the merits of the criminal charges, which remained (and to a significant extent remain) to be tried according to law. Once such observations are reproduced in headlines and on social media, they can acquire a public life far beyond their precise legal status — a phenomenon of some importance to the wider argument of this article, and one to which Part X returns in the context of the Gayatri litigation. Nupur Sharma therefore cannot responsibly be reduced to either of two slogans, “free speech hero” or “blasphemer.” The constitutionally relevant questions are more exacting: was the expression deliberate and malicious within the meaning given to that phrase in Ramji Lal Modi; what was its context and its target — an idea, a religious figure, or believers as a class; what consequences in fact followed; and was the resulting criminal process administered fairly. The value of constitutional analysis lies precisely in refusing to substitute slogans for these questions.
VIII. The Aligarh Muslim University Judgment: Minority Rights, Not Interpretive Sovereignty
The Aligarh Muslim University litigation supplies a different, but related, dimension of the argument: the distinction between protecting a minority institution and vesting a minority community with exclusive authority to determine the meaning of its own religion. In Aligarh Muslim University v. Naresh Agarwal, 2024 SCC OnLine SC 3213 decided on 8 November 2024, a seven-Judge Constitution Bench comprising Dr D.Y. Chandrachud, C.J., and Sanjiv Khanna, Surya Kant, J.B. Pardiwala, Dipankar Datta, Manoj Misra and Satish Chandra Sharma, JJ., reconsidered the principles governing the recognition of minority educational institutions under Article 30(1) of the Constitution. By a majority of 4:3, the Bench overruled the proposition laid down by the earlier five-Judge Bench in S. Azeez Basha v. Union of India, 1967 SCC OnLine SC 321 , which had held that an institution incorporated by statute cannot, by that fact, claim to be “established” by a minority, and that the words “establish” and “administer” in Article 30(1) must be satisfied conjunctively. The majority opinion, authored by Chief Justice Chandrachud and joined by Khanna, Pardiwala and Misra, JJ., held that an educational institution does not automatically lose its minority character merely because it derives its legal existence from a statute, and laid down indicia — principally, an enquiry into who was the “brain” behind the institution’s establishment — for determining minority character. The Bench did not itself decide whether AMU satisfies that test on the facts; that determination was left to a regular Bench to be constituted on the administrative side.
Surya Kant, J. was was one of three dissenting Judges — together with Dipankar Datta and Satish Chandra Sharma, JJ., each of whom wrote separately — who would have upheld Azeez Basha. Surya Kant, J. held, in substance, that there was no conflict between the earlier seven-Judge Bench decision in Kerala Education Bill, In re, 1958 SCC OnLine SC 8, and Azeez Basha; and that the six-Judge Bench proposition in Rev. Sidhajbhai Sabhai v. State of Bombay — that the right under Article 30 is “absolute and unconditional” — no longer represents good law, having been qualified in T.M.A. Pai Foundation v. State of Karnataka, (2002) 8 SCC 481, so that Azeez Basha‘s failure to follow Sidhajbhai Sabhai disclosed no legal infirmity in it. It is Dipankar Datta, J.,reasoned that any new indicia for minority status should apply prospectively rather than retrospectively, and who was of the view that AMU itself was not, on the facts as he read them, a minority institution. Treating any one of these three separate dissents, or Justice Kant’s opinion in particular, as though it were simply an “Islamophobia judgment” would misdescribe both its content and its place in the 4:3 arithmetic of the case; the correct characterisation is that of a closely divided Bench disagreeing over the interpretive method for Article 30(1), not over the value of any religion or community. If an article on the politics of meaning is to argue for clean information, it must itself practise clean information, and the attribution of judicial opinions is precisely the kind of detail where that discipline is tested.
Yet the AMU case remains highly relevant to a theory of blasphemy, because it exposes the distinction between minority protection and interpretive authority that runs through this entire article. Article 30 protects the right of a religious or linguistic minority to establish and administer educational institutions of its choice; it does not, and was never understood by any of the seven Judges to, confer upon a minority community an exclusive right to determine the meaning of its own religion for the community’s individual members. A genuinely plural conception of minority rights must leave room for disagreement within the minority itself. A Muslim citizen does not become constitutionally free to speak only when speaking in a voice approved by a religious or educational institution associated with the community.
IX. Spivak and the Subaltern: Who Is Allowed to Speak
This is where Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s theory of the subaltern becomes indispensable. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (University of Illinois Press, 1988) 271, Spivak is concerned fundamentally with representation: who speaks, who is represented, and whether the person ostensibly being represented is in fact permitted to speak in her own voice, or is instead spoken for by institutions, elites, or well-meaning outsiders. Applied to blasphemy controversies, the question becomes: can the person accused of blasphemy speak, and be heard, before the community, the media, the police and political actors have already decided, among themselves, what that person meant? The accused risks becoming an object of representation — discussed, defined, and disposed of by others — before ever becoming a speaking subject in the proceeding that concerns her.
The subaltern, on this account, is not necessarily identical with the religious minority in numerical terms. A Muslim may be marginalised within a Muslim institution; a Hindu reformer may be marginalised within a Hindu religious establishment; a woman may challenge a patriarchal reading of scripture common to her own community; a believer from a socially subordinated group may challenge an elite religious authority claiming to speak for the whole faith. The subaltern question is ultimately a question of power and voice, not simply of numerical majority and minority status. This is precisely why religious freedom, properly understood, must protect internal dissent within a religious community as much as it protects the community’s collective identity against outsiders — a point the AMU case leaves open and the Gayatri litigation, considered next, illustrates from a different angle.
X. The Gayatri Litigation: Allegation, Adjudication, and the Manufacture of Meaning
The Allahabad High Court’s 2025 disposal of a public interest litigation concerning a book on the Gayatri Mantra illustrates a further, and distinct, part of the same problem: the difference between an allegation and an adjudication. In Satya Sanatan Dharm Dharmatma Kalyan Samiti v. State of U.P., 2025:AHC:36470-DB a Division Bench of the Allahabad High Court comprising Chief Justice Arun Bhansali and Justice Kshitij Shailendra dismissed a PIL seeking a ban on the printing, publication, distribution and circulation of a book titled Tathakathit Gayatri Devi Mantra Ki Vastavikta (authored by Sant Gyaneshwar Swami Sadanand ji Paramhans), which the petitioner-organisation alleged contained derogatory treatment of Goddess Gayatri and the Gayatri Mantra. As reported, the Bench dismissed the petition on the ground that an earlier, substantially similar PIL by the same petitioner concerning the same book had already been dismissed as infructuous in 2016, and that the subsequent petition could not be entertained in light of that litigation history.
The Court, on this record, did not adjudicate — and was not required to adjudicate — the theological merits of the allegation that the book was derogatory of the Goddess Gayatri. The petition was disposed of on a threshold, procedural ground concerning the maintainability of a repeat PIL, not on a finding that the book’s contents were or were not blasphemous. This distinction is not a minor technicality; it is close to the heart of the argument this article makes about the politics of meaning. An allegation can, through mere repetition in public discourse, come to be treated as an established fact. A dismissed PIL can be remembered, inaccurately, as a judicial finding that a work is or is not derogatory. A judicial observation, as seen in the Nupur Sharma proceedings, can be recalled as though it were a formal ruling. A single quotation can come to stand, in public memory, for an entire argument. This is how misquotation and omission manufacture meaning in a way courts themselves never sanctioned. In a constitutional democracy committed to the rule of law, the record must precede the narrative, and the first question in any controversy of this kind should always be: what, precisely, does the record establish?
XI. Towards a Principle of Disciplined Freedom
Ambedkar’s Partition-era analysis, the Nupur Sharma controversy, the Aligarh Muslim University judgment, the Gayatri litigation, and Spivak’s theory of the subaltern converge on a single constitutional proposition, even though they arise from entirely different fields of Indian public life. Ambedkar examined the political consequences of collective religious identity, and Partition demonstrated the catastrophic possibility of converting that identity into territorial sovereignty. Nupur Sharma demonstrated the volatile interaction between religious offence, mass media and the machinery of criminal process, and the importance of not mistaking oral observation for adjudicated fact. The Aligarh Muslim University case raises the constitutional question of minority identity and institutional autonomy, and cautions against attributing to any one judgment, or any one Judge’s opinion within it, a political label it does not bear. The Gayatri litigation demonstrates the necessity of distinguishing an allegation from a judicial determination. Spivak asks whether the person actually being represented in these controversies is permitted to speak in her own voice at all. Together, they reveal that power over representation is, in practice, power over meaning.
The governing constitutional principle should therefore be neither unrestricted censorship nor unrestricted speech, but disciplined freedom. The Muslim citizen must be protected from Islamophobia; the Hindu citizen from anti-Hindu hatred; the believer of any faith from persecution; the religious dissenter from theological censorship; the accused from an inaccurate public narrative; and the public at large from the silent transformation of allegation into adjudicated fact. The Constitution protects religious conscience without creating religious sovereignty, and protects speech without protecting deliberate and malicious hatred. Let the believer speak. Let the dissenter speak. Let the accused speak. Let the subaltern speak. Let the complete record speak. Only then should the law decide. Religion may be sacred, conscience may be inviolable, and identity may be constitutionally protected — but no community, and no single interpretation, should become the sovereign owner of meaning.
Table of Authorities and References
A. Cases
Ramji Lal Modi v. State of U.P., AIR 1957 SC 620 : 1957 SCR 860 : 1957 SCC OnLine SC 77.
- Azeez Basha v. Union of India, 1967 SCC OnLine SC 321 : AIR 1968 SC 662.
Rev. Sidhajbhai Sabhai v. State of Bombay, AIR 1963 SC 540.
Kerala Education Bill, In re, 1958 SCC OnLine SC 8 : AIR 1958 SC 956.
T.M.A. Pai Foundation v. State of Karnataka, (2002) 8 SCC 481.
Aligarh Muslim University v. Naresh Agarwal, 2024 SCC OnLine SC 3213
N.V. Sharma v. Union of India, 2022 SCC OnLine SC 1003
Satya Sanatan Dharm Dharmatma Kalyan Samiti v. State of U.P., 2025:AHC:36470-DB
B. Books, Articles and Reports
B.R. Ambedkar, Pakistan or the Partition of India (1st edn 1940; 3rd edn 1946), reproduced in Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, Vol. 8 (Government of Maharashtra).
Isha Upanishad, verse 1.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (University of Illinois Press, 1988) 271.
Advay Vora, “Aligarh Muslim University Judgement: Explained”, Supreme Court Observer (November 2024).
“AMU Verdict: Supreme Court Rules on Minority Status of Educational Institutions”, SCC OnLine Blog (8 November 2024).
“Supreme Court AMU Verdict: 3 Judges Dissent on Minority Status of the University”, SCC OnLine Blog (8 November 2024).
“Prophet Remark Row: All FIRs Against Nupur Sharma Clubbed”, SCC OnLine Blog (August 2022).
“Allahabad High Court Rejects PIL Seeking Ban on Book on Goddess Gayatri”, Law Trend (20 March 2025).
