Keep the altar and the Assembly apart

THERE is a question the Punjab government did not ask before convening a special session of the Vidhan Sabha on April 13 to pass — unanimously and in evident haste — the Jaagat Jot Sri Guru Granth Sahib Satkar (Amendment) Act, 2026. Can the State legislate faith without eventually violating it? The answer, delivered within weeks by the Akal Takht, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) and the internal logic of the Act itself, is that it cannot and that the altar and the Assembly must never meet.

When political authority begins to police religious belief through punitive law, religion is subordinated and transformed into an administrative category, with devotion becoming susceptible to surveillance.

The legislation was framed by Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann as a “historic correction” and presented as the AAP government's answer to a decade of unresolved sacrilege cases that had caused profound anguish to the Sikh community. The Bargari desecrations, the police firing at Behbal Kalan, the saroop stolen from Burj Jawahar Singh Wala (all in 2015) and the Golden Temple incident (2021), whose perpetrators were never publicly identified, are grievances that are not politically fabricated. They are open wounds.

Any government seeking Sikh electoral support had reasons to address them, with the Act prescribing imprisonment of not less than seven years, extendable to 20, with a fine up to Rs 10 lakh. In cases involving conspiracy to disturb communal harmony, life imprisonment can be awarded. The Act expands the definition of sacrilege to cover spoken, written, symbolic and electronic expression that intentionally hurts Sikh religious feelings, and it notifies all offences as cognisable, non-bailable and non-compoundable.

The Akal Takht’s response, and it is the most telling fact in this entire episode, was not to celebrate but to object. Within weeks of the law receiving the Punjab Governor’s assent on April 17, the Akal Takht’s officiating Jathedar, Giani Kuldip Singh Gargaj, and SGPC president Harjinder Singh Dhami met Governor Gulab Chand Kataria to submit a list of objections and demand a review. CM Mann ruled out a review; instead, he launched a statewide “Shukrana Yatra” to celebrate the Act’s passage. The irony of the state government thanking itself for a law that it claimed would protect the sanctity of Sikh religion appears to have been lost on him.

To understand what the Akal Takht was objecting to, it is necessary to distinguish carefully between two institutions that the 2026 Act has fatally conflated. The Akal Takht was historically conceived as the sovereign, spiritual and temporal authority of the Sikh Panth, a seat independent of political power. The SGPC was created through a colonial-era legislation, the Sikh Gurdwara Act of 1925, as a statutory body for the management of gurdwaras, and answerable for elections and party politics.

Over the decades, the two became institutionally entangled through the dominance of the Shiromani Akali Dal, which has historically controlled both. The result is that an elected statutory management body, deeply enmeshed in Punjab’s factional politics, has come to take on the role of spiritual authority. The 2026 Act gives that conflation the force of criminal law.

What the Act actually does, beyond its penalty clauses, is assign the SGPC a sweeping quasi-regulatory role over the physical existence of the Guru Granth Sahib itself. The SGPC must maintain a central register of all saroops in Punjab, assign each a unique identification number and record details of printing, storage, distribution, location and custodianship. Statutory duties are imposed on “custodians” — a category that in practice encompasses granthis, gurdwara management committees and ordinary devotees — to ensure safe custody, observe the Sikh Rehat Maryada, prevent misuse or damage and report any suspected sacrilege to both the police authorities and management bodies.

The Rehat Maryada, Sikhism’s code of religious conduct, has thus been incorporated by legislative reference into a criminal statute. Failure to observe it, or to report a suspected breach, is no longer a matter of religious discipline; it becomes a police matter.

Every religion develops norms and codes in order to sustain itself. Religious norms must emerge organically within the spiritual community, not through coercive State legislation backed by imprisonment. An elected political-religious institution cannot become the legal custodian of faith. The distinction that the Act obliterates is the one between moral authority, institutional guidance and criminal coercion. The first two are the proper domain of a religious community. The third belongs to the State. Once they are fused, the State does not merely administer religion. It replaces the latter. Legislation, indeed, must stay within limits.

It is the concern that the law criminalises ordinary religious life rather than targeting desecrators that has spurred resistance from within the Sikh establishment itself. Voices associated with the Akal Takht have warned that the terminology of “custodian” may expose granthis, devotees and gurdwara committees to criminal prosecution for lapses that are accidental or matters of legitimate internal theological disagreement. The law thus may invite systematic police intrusion into the daily conduct of religious life.

Moreover, the Panth was not adequately consulted before a statute purporting to codify the terms of its most sacred obligations was passed in a hurried two-day special session. That the SGPC and the Akal Takht initially welcomed the legislation, then rapidly reversed course, is itself a measure of how poorly thought through the Act was.

Faith cannot be reduced to obedience enforced by legislation. The Guru Granth Sahib is not a text that has survived by sheltering behind State power. It has survived because its authority rests not on coercion but on devotion freely given. To convert that scripture into a protected zone whose boundaries are patrolled by the police and enforced by a sessions court is not to honour the tradition but rather to betray it. The Akal Takht understood this. It is an irony that the legislature did not.

India’s constitutional framework anticipated precisely this danger. The secular republic was not designed as a State hostile to religion, but as one that maintained principled distance from all faiths, preventing both the capture of religion by political authority and vice versa. The 2026 Act violates that distance in both directions. It allows the State to enter theological territory that it has no competence to adjudicate, while handing a politically entangled religious institution the coercive power it has no democratic mandate to wield.

The legal challenges have already begun. A petition before the Punjab and Haryana High Court seeks to quash the Act on constitutional grounds, arguing that a penal framework which singles out one religion’s scripture for special protection, while leaving all others unaddressed, fails the most basic test of equality before law (Article 14).

The secular State that legislates reverence for one faith’s holy book, however sincerely motivated, has some explaining to do. This is precisely the ground on which Punjab’s anti-sacrilege legislation is being tested.