When the Law Fell Short: The Case for Protection of Hindu Deities Act

“Sanatan Sabiyata needs adequate protection. There is a need to examine whether the existing legal and constitutional provisions provide sufficient safeguards against deliberate and malicious acts that insult Hindu deities and deeply held religious beliefs when compared to the other religious sentiments Freedom of expression is a foundational pillar of Indian democracy — but the Constitution has never treated it as absolute. Article 19(2) permits reasonable restrictions in the interest of public order and other recognised objectives. The real question facing India today is not whether speech should remain free — it should — but whether the deliberate, malicious degradation of Hindu deities deserves recognition as a distinct criminal wrong, rather than an incidental byproduct of laws written for an entirely different purpose. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita’s provisions on outraging religious feelings (Section 298, successor to the colonial-era IPC 295A) were designed to protect public order and the sentiments of a religious group — not the dignity of the deity itself. This is not a technicality. It means Indian law recognises Hindu deities as juristic persons capable of owning temple land and suing in court, yet offers no equivalent protection for that same deity’s dignity against calculated insult. The law defends the deity’s property. It does not defend the deity. Worse, decades of judicial interpretation have narrowed the provision further. Courts have consistently held that insults made carelessly, or without proof of deliberate and malicious intent, fall entirely outside the law’s reach. In principle, this protects genuine artists and scholars from overreach. In practice, it has set the evidentiary bar so high that devotees seeking redress for calculated provocation are routinely left with no remedy at all. There are three cases which have same pattern: PK (2013) When this film’s treatment of Hindu worship practices sparked protests, vandalised theatres, and public outrage across Indian cities, the response Hindu devotees received was not a courtroom hearing — it was the street. No meaningful prosecution followed the outrage. The film continued its national run unaffected. For millions who felt their faith had been mocked for commercial gain, the episode exposed a hard truth: existing law gave them no real forum, only agitation as a last resort. The 2021 stand-up case: A comedian’s remarks about Hindu deities at a New Year event led to arrest and a prolonged bail process that resolved without any final adjudication on the underlying conduct. Whatever view one takes of that case, it illustrates the same structural failure from the other direction: a law so imprecisely calibrated that it satisfies no one — critics call it prone to misuse, while devotees who felt genuinely aggrieved saw the matter fade without ever being tested on its merits. The temple-grounds filming controversy: When a global streaming series filmed an intimate scene on temple premises, a police complaint was lodged — and went nowhere. No consequence followed for a production widely seen by devotees as treating sacred space as a convenient commercial backdrop. Three different fact patterns. One shared outcome: the law offered devotees neither vindication nor deterrence. India already legislates targeted protections when general provisions prove structurally inadequate to a specific harm — POCSO for offences against children, the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act for caste-based violence, dedicated provisions under the IT Act for cyber offences. Each exists because Parliament concluded that folding a distinct wrong into general criminal categories under-protects the people it is meant to serve. The deliberate, malicious degradation of what a billion people regard as living divinity is no less specific a harm, and deserves no less precisely drafted a response. A protection of Hindu Deities Act should criminalise only acts done with proven deliberate and malicious intent to degrade — not criticism, satire, or scholarship; explicitly protect academic research, journalism, judicial proceedings, and good-faith theological debate, including arguments critical of deity-worship itself, which have always been part of Hindu philosophical tradition; treat qualifying offences as cognizable and non-bailable where malicious intent is clearly established, matching the speed of digital-age harm; and require senior-officer sanction before an FIR is registered, and government sanction before prosecution — precisely to prevent the harassment-litigation pattern that has plagued existing provisions. The strongest objection to any such law is that it will chill legitimate speech — including Hinduism’s own long tradition of internal critique, from the Bhakti poets to philosophical schools that questioned deity-worship directly. That objection must be taken seriously, not waved away. It is answered not by softening the law’s consequences, but by sharpening its definitions: a narrow, clearly bounded intent standard is what separates a defensible law from a censorship regime. A statute that is strict but imprecise repeats the very failure this piece has documented. A statute that is strict and precise corrects it. Sanatan Sabiyata needs adequate protection. There is a need to examine whether the existing legal and constitutional provisions provide sufficient safeguards against deliberate and malicious acts that insult Hindu deities and deeply held religious beliefs when compared to the other religious sentiments Every serious civilisation legislates to protect what it holds sacred. India, custodian of the world’s oldest continuously practised religious tradition, has left this particular gap unaddressed for a century — since Section 295A was first drafted in 1927, for a colonial context entirely different from today’s digital economy of viral provocation. The question is no longer whether India can rely on general provisions never designed for this purpose. The question is whether Parliament will finally close a gap that has left devotees without recourse, again and again, in case after case.