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Till as recently as 2016, a person could be put into jail for attempting suicide. The best way to deal with someone in as vulnerable a stage as to attempt suicide? I’d say not. This is just one example of the numerous outdated, problematic laws that continue to govern our country. What starts off as an attempt to better the lives of citizens, more often than not, does more damage than good. This can be attributed to bad execution and lack of implementation, unclear thought processes and sometimes just plain and simple bad ideas.
On August 21 the Punjab Cabinet proposed life imprisonment for “sacrilege of all religious texts.” Simply put, this means the hurting of religious sentiments through violation or misuse of religious texts in any manner. “We will place the Bill in the Vidhan Sabha for approval. I stand firmly committed to preserve communal harmony in the State,” said Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh in a tweet posted on August 21.
This bill was initially proposed to the Center earlier in March 2017, and took into consideration only the Guru Granth Sahib. However, it was rejected on the grounds of going against secularism, an indispensable part of our Constitution. The most recent version, proposed by Chief Minister Singh’s Cabinet, has taken into account not just the Guru Granth Sahib, but also the Gita, Quran and Bible.
Essentially, the bill is a reflection of sentiments that arose after the violence that followed the destruction of religious texts in Moga, Malerkotla, and other parts of Punjab between 2015 and 2017.
What stands out the most about this proposed bill is that it carries an extremely harsh sentence for those convicted – life imprisonment. When compared to the two to 10-year-long sentence meted out for damaging a place of worship, the punishment of life imprisonment seems rather extreme.
Another point of contention with this bill is that it does not effectively guard against abuse and high-handedness. How does one know if the Punjab Cabinet’s attempt to curb communal violence and maintain harmony will not result in people pouring onto the streets in protest, hate being translated into cars being torched or innocents being lynched to death?
Also, what does ‘sacrilege’ mean, anyway? Does it mean tearing pages out of a religious text, strewing them onto the streets and stomping all over them or could it also translate into a group of friends joking around and ending up in jail? This lack of clarity is an open invitation for people to bend the law to fit their needs. Misusing something that doesn’t have a clear purpose to start with is not all that difficult.
Is the Punjab Cabinet’s endeavour to bring about a wave of peace a good idea after all? Well, I am not entirely convinced.
Representational feature image source: Inshorts
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