Blasphemy Laws Across South Asia: Religious Freedom and Digital Expression in Bangladesh

The Accusation That Changes Everything

In August 2024, twin brothers Rahil and Sahil — sixteen years old, from a Christian family in Pakistan — were accused of tearing pages from the Quran during a village festival. The accusation, rooted in an unresolved school dispute, was enough. Police arrested them. Their mother was taken into custody to compel their surrender. For five months, the twins slept on the bare floor of a cell shared with three Muslim inmates. They were eventually acquitted in January 2025 — an unusually swift outcome in a legal system where blasphemy cases routinely stretch for years and sometimes decades. That they were freed at all made them the exception.

Across South Asia, blasphemy — the act of speaking against or insulting a religion — occupies a uniquely dangerous legal and social space. In Pakistan, it carries a mandatory death sentence under Section 295-C of the Penal Code, though no execution has been carried out through formal judicial process. In Bangladesh, it sits at the intersection of colonial penal law, successive digital security legislation, and a constitutional architecture that simultaneously guarantees freedom of expression and declares Islam the state religion. In India, colonial-era provisions on religious offences remain in force. Across all three countries, the pattern is consistent: laws designed ostensibly to protect religious harmony are deployed systematically against minorities, dissidents, and the politically inconvenient.

Pakistan: The Institutionalisation of a Weapon

Pakistan's blasphemy laws have their origin in colonial-era provisions designed to curb sectarian violence. Since the Zia ul-Haq era in the 1980s, when the laws were significantly strengthened, they have become among the most lethal instruments in South Asia's legal arsenal. The Center for Social Justice documented 344 new blasphemy cases in Pakistan in 2024 alone — a record figure. By mid-2024, Pakistan's National Commission for Human Rights reported that 767 people had been incarcerated on blasphemy charges, up from 11 in 2020. Since 1987, nearly 2,800 people have been accused under these provisions. Between 1994 and 2024, at least 104 people were killed in mob or vigilante violence following blasphemy accusations.

The pattern of targeting is not random. Of the 344 new cases in 2024, 70 percent of the accused were Muslim — demonstrating that the laws are used as a general instrument of persecution, not solely against non-Muslims. But the proportional impact on minorities is severe: 9 percent of cases involved Hindus and 14 percent involved Ahmadis, communities that together represent a fraction of Pakistan's population. Christians have faced entire neighbourhoods destroyed following accusations, as in the 2023 Jaranwala attacks where more than two dozen churches were burned.

A January 2024 police intelligence report — titled "The Blasphemy Business" — documented what human rights organizations had long observed: an organized criminal network, operating with alleged FIA complicity, was fabricating blasphemy accusations through social media entrapment and then extorting accused individuals and their families. The network was reportedly responsible for 90 percent of FIA blasphemy cases since 2021. The Islamabad High Court in July 2025 ordered an inquiry commission to investigate the systemic misuse. The commission was subsequently cancelled. In December 2025, a Lahore High Court bench acquitted six individuals sentenced to death or life imprisonment in a digital blasphemy case, finding the prosecution had established no credible link between the accused and the alleged online material.

The Colonial Foundation and South Asia's Shared Legal Architecture

To understand why Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka all have some form of blasphemy provision, the starting point is the Indian Penal Code of 1860. Drafted by the British colonial administration, the Code included provisions on religious offences designed to manage communal violence in a diverse, multi-religious society that the colonial state had no interest in genuinely harmonising. Upon partition and independence, the successor states inherited this code — and, in most cases, kept it.

In Bangladesh and India, the same five colonial-era offences remain in force. Pakistan and Sri Lanka have added provisions. The IPC's Section 295, which criminalises injuring or defiling a place of worship, and Section 298, which punishes words or gestures intended to wound religious feelings, remain active in Bangladesh under the Penal Code 1860. What Bangladesh added — first under the Information and Communication Technology Act 2006, then the Digital Security Act 2018, then the Cyber Security Act 2023 — was a parallel digital enforcement architecture that transformed the colonial framework into a surveillance-ready instrument for the internet age.

Bangladesh's Constitutional Contradiction

The Constitution of Bangladesh presents a studied tension. Article 39 guarantees freedom of thought, conscience, and expression. Article 41 guarantees freedom of religion. Article 28 prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion. Yet Article 2A declares Islam the state religion, while permitting the practice of other faiths. The 15th Amendment, passed in 2011 under the Hasina government, inserted Article 7B, which made certain constitutional provisions unamendable — locking in the state religion clause and limiting the scope of future legislative reform.

The Constitutional Reform Commission, established after the August 2024 transition, recommended in January 2025 the deletion of Articles 8 and 12 — which deal with secularism and the proscription of religion-based politics respectively. Commission head Ali Riaz described secularism as a Western concept ill-suited to Bangladesh's tradition, arguing that "pluralism" was a more appropriate framing for a country with deep traditions of syncretic religious coexistence. The recommendation remains contested. Critics argue that removing explicit secularism provisions without robust minority protection architecture simply clears legal space for majoritarian religious politics.

The Digital Security Architecture: Blasphemy in the Social Media Age

Bangladesh's Digital Security Act 2018 was the instrument that brought blasphemy law into the Facebook era. Section 28 of the DSA criminalised the publication of any digital content that "hurts religious sentiment" — a phrase sufficiently vague to cover almost any critical commentary on religion posted online. Crucially, the DSA redesignated blasphemy from a non-cognisable offence under the Penal Code to a cognisable, non-bailable offence — meaning police could arrest suspects without a warrant and courts could deny bail. The punishment was raised to five years imprisonment, three years more than the Penal Code provision.

The consequences were documented extensively. Over 2,000 cases were filed under the DSA during its five-year tenure. More than 83 percent of cases involved social media posts on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and similar platforms. Poritosh Sarkar was sentenced to five years under the DSA for a Facebook post he made as a teenager — he spent eight months in solitary confinement in pre-trial detention in 2021, in the tenth grade. Hindu and Buddhist minorities were disproportionately targeted. The Human Rights Congress for Bangladesh Minorities documented cases in which individuals' Facebook accounts were hacked by Islamist actors, who then posted offensive content and filed DSA complaints against the account holders — an almost exact replication of Pakistan's "blasphemy business" mechanism.

When the Hasina government replaced the DSA with the Cyber Security Act 2023, Amnesty International described it as "largely a replication of the draconian law that preceded it." An analysis found that 58 of the DSA's 62 provisions were retained — 28 verbatim, 25 with minor changes. Section 28, covering religious sentiment, remained. The maximum sentence was reduced from five years to two years and a fine of 500,000 taka (approximately £3,500), but the cognisable and non-bailable character of the offence was preserved.

The Post-Transition Reform — and What Remains

The August 2024 political transition created genuine legislative momentum. The interim government announced in March 2025 that 410 cases filed under the CSA for "speech offences" were being withdrawn. Law Adviser Professor Asif Nazrul confirmed that cases filed on charges of expressing opinion were being dropped. A draft Cyber Protection Ordinance was published in January 2025 to replace the CSA entirely. However, Article 19 — the international freedom of expression organisation — noted in February 2025 that the new draft retained provisions criminalising the spread of "religious hatred" and "hurting religious sentiment," preserving the legal architecture most susceptible to misuse.

The interim government's position reflects a genuine dilemma. Bangladesh is a majority-Muslim country of approximately 168 million people, with a significant minority population: roughly 8 percent Hindu, 1 percent Buddhist, and 0.3 percent Christian. Violence against minorities spiked dramatically in the political upheaval of 2024 — the Bangladesh Buddhist Hindu Christian Unity Council reported 2,184 incidents between August and December 2024, though the figure was contested by authorities who characterised many incidents as politically rather than religiously motivated. The USCIRF's 2025 factsheet documented 2,924 attacks against religious minority communities in July 2024 alone, per UN reporting.

Chief Adviser Yunus met with religious minority leaders in December 2024, publicly reiterating commitments to equality. The government has condemned mob violence and, in some cases, prosecuted perpetrators. But the structural conditions that enable accusation-based persecution — vague legal definitions, non-bailable detention, social media's capacity for rapid mobilisation, and a judiciary that moves slowly when defendants are from minority communities — remain in place.

The Regional Pattern and the International Standard

LSE's South Asia Blog research, drawing on comparative analysis, noted that "countries with blasphemy laws tend to face more communal violence than countries without." The correlation is not coincidental. When law provides a legitimate mechanism for persecution — a formal accusation that triggers state power — vigilante violence operates in its shadow, confident that the state's architecture supports rather than opposes the underlying dynamic.

Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India are all signatories to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which protects freedom of expression under Article 19. The ICCPR permits restrictions on expression that are provided by law, pursue a legitimate aim, and are necessary and proportionate. Academic and UN analysis consistently finds that South Asia's blasphemy provisions — particularly the vague "hurt religious sentiment" formulation and the cognisable, non-bailable character of digital blasphemy offences — fail this three-part test. They are disproportionate, they lack legal certainty, and their demonstrated pattern of use against minorities and dissidents cannot be reconciled with a legitimate aim of protecting religious harmony.

Bangladesh's Constitutional Reform Commission, the draft Cyber Protection Ordinance, and the withdrawal of 410 speech-offence cases represent meaningful steps in a direction that the law and international human rights standards support. But reform of the legal text is only the first threshold. The deeper challenge is institutional: building a judiciary and law enforcement system in which an accusation of religious offence is treated as a claim requiring evidence, not a trigger for arrest — and in which the accused, regardless of religion, receives the equal protection that Bangladesh's own constitution promises.