Opinion From a corner of a foreign court

However the debate that the incident has generated both within and outside the world of the faithful transgresses the confines of classical texts and traditions. This is where the anti-sedition law — Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code — and the blasphemy law — Sections 295-298 of the Pakistan Penal Code — come to mirror each other. Both disrespect democratic conscience,and compete to outrage individual freedoms: one the freedom of political expression,and the other religious.

Both of them also come surprisingly close to each other in terms of the disproportionate quantum of punishment that the laws entail. The utterance by word itself,“either spoken or written,or by visible representation,or by any imputation,innuendo or insinuation directly or indirectly”,against the Prophet is enough of an offence in Pakistan to invite death. Similarly,mere articulation “either spoken or written,or by signs,or by visible representation,or otherwise” of “hatred or attempts to bring hatred or contempt” that “excites” or can but be assumed to have “attempted to excite disaffection towards the government” is liable to be punished with a maximum of imprisonment for life. Clearly both laws make no correlation between concrete offence and recommended retribution. And it is this ambiguity that allows for the cases of Binayak Sen or Asiya Bibi. It defies all principles of justice.

The parallel doesn’t end here: both the sections of the criminal code have a shared history rooted in the colonial enactment of the Indian Penal Code in 1860. Not to be missed is the context of the 1857 insurrection,which prompted their promulgation. Both laws were importations from English law into the colonial IPC,serving the exigencies emerging from the Rebellion: one repressed any unwarranted criticism of the colonial regime,the other served to pamper Indian clerics vis-a-vis the reformists. Both upheld conformity against freedom. Pakistan’s blasphemy laws therefore have a Judeo-Christian pre-history rather than Islamic,as the case is being made out to be. Blasphemy and sedition display much greater intimacy,one which defies the tradition/modernity or West/East duality. Rather,these laws are marks of a certain continuity. Nationalism replaced religion as the founding principle of nation-states,demanding one’s loyalty to the state be sole and final,the kind of fidelity that only religion could command earlier. In countries where the papacy was replaced by a national church,religion received the patronage of the state,as in England. Sedition here was an “attempt other than by lawful means the alteration of any matter in Church or State.” Blasphemy laws were designed to protect the church from the defiance of Christian modernists and agnostics,much less from other religions. While the UK abolished such laws only recently,unenforceable provisions against blasphemy survive in many states of the US. 

Asiya Bibi’s is not an isolated case,nor is Binayak Sen’s conviction. The blasphemy provisions continue to be rampantly misused against the religious minorities in Pakistan. Similarly,Sen’s conviction under sedition follows that of many others and along with two others,Piyush Guha and Narayan Sanyal. Nonetheless,it demands introspection.

Claimants of minority rights in India,identity specialists and community spokesmen who swear by religious freedom — Jamiat-e-Ulemas and Jamaat-e-Islami,Shahi Imams and Shahabuddins — have all remained conspicuously silent so far on Taseer’s killing,on the celebration thereafter,on the dreadful conviction of Asiya Bibi and on the provisions of blasphemy and the continuous Christian incarcerations.

Their politics can be summed up by another incident this time in Delhi,the demolition of a mosque that stood apparently on DDA land. The conservative outrage has been directed against demolition of the mosque but not against the eviction of the Muslim slum-dwellers who built it. The orthodoxy’s love for symbolism is simply astonishing. One is not seeking a test of loyalty that is mischievously demanded by the Hindu Right; rather it is a test of conviction,a test of your commitment to democracy,pluralism and right to life. The silence is deafening — the message however is loud and clear.

The civil in civil society are outraged,both in India and Pakistan. The young chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party purportedly vowed a “holy war” against fundamentalists. A general secretary of the Congress Party has asked for a review of the trial court’s judgment against Sen. But surely there is much more at their command than mere pious utterances of conscience? The PPP-led Pakistani government could abolish blasphemy from its criminal code; the minimum is to decriminalise it. The archaic provision of sedition ought to be purged from our legal discourse. Concretely and more immediately,the government should not oppose Sen’s bail in the high court.

The writer teaches at the Department of Sociology,Jamia Millia Islamia