Open Access Research Article
White Black Legal – International Law Journal · ISSN 2581-8503
IMPACT OF MEDIA IN BLASPHEMY: FROM THE PRINT PUBLIC SPHERE TO THE PLATFORM ECONOMY IN INDIA
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Abstract
IMPACT
OF MEDIA IN BLASPHEMY: FROM THE PRINT PUBLIC SPHERE TO THE PLATFORM ECONOMY IN
INDIA
AUTHORED
BY - ANJU R V
Abstract
Blasphemy
is an offence that cannot exist without the media. Defined in Indian law as the
deliberate and malicious communication of insult or irreverence directed at
that which a class of persons holds sacred, its actus reus is entirely
communicative, and its effects are mediated through the audiences it reaches.
This study examines the mutually constitutive relationship between media and
blasphemy in India across three media revolutions. In the print era, the
colonial draftsmen expressly recognised "the power of publications,"
and the Rangila Rasul pamphlet controversy of the 1920s directly precipitated
the enactment of Section 295A in 1927 — an enactment that, as the historical
scholarship demonstrates, did not prevent religious violence but encouraged
violent display and educated religious publics in the uses of legal complaint.
In the broadcast era, the live televised debate produced a new scene of
accusation, exemplified by controversies in which remarks about the Prophet
Muhammad made on national television were condemned by Muslim scholars and
defended by Hindu scholars as legitimate opinion, heightening inter-community
tension. In the digital era, the platform economy has transformed the offence's
scale and mechanics: organised WhatsApp networks circulate misinformation that
culminates in mob violence, video content is processed more superficially and
shared more readily than text, meme-based provocations such as the Kali meme
controversy have driven platform suspensions and constitutional litigation, and
vigilante attacks on minority worshippers are filmed and circulated as
spectacles while the victims are themselves charged under the religious-offence
provisions The study evaluates the legal
framework governing this nexus — the constitutional guarantee of free speech,
the religious-offence provisions of the Indian Penal Code and the Bharatiya
Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, and the intermediary regime of the Information Technology
Rules, 2021.
Keywords:
Blasphemy; media; Section 295A; social media; misinformation; mob violence;
freedom of speech; religious offence; India
INTRODUCTION
Blasphemy
is an offence which has no possibility of existing without the media; according
to Indian law, its actus reus is completely communicative — that is,
"words, whether spoken or written, or by signs or by visible
representations" — and the essential aspect of the offence is the effect
which this communication has on the religious feelings of an audience. It can
therefore be said that the history of blasphemy law is, in a significant way, a
history of the media: every change in the media environment has altered both
the number of cases of religious offence and the law's ability to regulate
them. The colonial legislators were fully aware of this. The 1927 amendment to
the Penal Code, which introduced Section 295A, deliberately changed the aim of
the law from religion itself to the hurt feelings of believers,
"explicitly acknowledging the power of publications", the provision
arising out of a pamphlet controversy in which the printed public sphere had shown
that it could influence crowds.[1]
Since
that time, the Indian media environment has experienced three more revolutions—print
media, broadcast television, and then networked social media platforms—each of
which has altered the way media interacts with blasphemy. The academic work
that underpins this study identifies the key dynamics: in practice,
controversies concerning religious offence in South Asia are created, handled
and brought to court through media organisations and platforms; outrage is a
phenomenon saturated with media coverage, ; and the digital world has
transformed outrage from a local issue into a global one[2].
Print
Media and the Colonial Public Sphere
The
Indian blasphemy law originated in the context of printed material. The
pamphlet Rangila Rasul, published in Lahore in the 1920s and considered
offensive to the Prophet Muhammad, sparked a controversy that grew from
communal unrest into legal action and eventually reached the Central
Legislative Assembly, where Section 295A was passed in 1927. This situation
revealed the inadequacy of the old law in dealing with publications: since the
prosecution failed, the legislature reacted by introducing a new provision that
specifically extended the criminal law to include publications. Thus, print was
the original form of the offence and the colonial lawmakers designed the law
with its characteristics in mind—such as attributable authorship, limited
circulation, and a slow temporal development.[3]
In
India, after it gained its independence, the system established during the
print era continued to apply: Section 295A and the other related provisions
remained in force to regulate the press, and the courts interpreted them
narrowly — a prosecution could only succeed if there was evidence of deliberate
and malicious intent. At the same time, however, the medium was changing, and
this had an effect on the nature of blasphemy.
Broadcast
Media: The Televised Controversy
The
coming of broadcast television — and especially the 24-hour news debate format
— has turned the studio into a place where accusations of blasphemy frequently
occur. The typical example is the Nupur Sharma affair.[4]
When a spokesperson of the ruling party made remarks about the Prophet Muhammad
at the end of May 2022 during a televised debate, this triggered at once a
widespread controversy and intensified the tensions between the Hindu and
Muslim communities. This incident clearly illustrated the way in which a modern
media controversy works: Muslim scholars declared the remarks to be completely
inappropriate and a breach of the respect due to the Prophet, while Hindu
scholars maintained that no disrespect had taken place and that the speaker had
simply been putting forward her own independent views within the context of the
television debate. The subsequent legal action and political crisis centered on
the line separating freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and freedom of
religion — a boundary that the media event had made inevitable. There are three
important differences between the televised controversy and its print
counterpart from a legal standpoint. The first is that the audience is both
large and immediate; the second is that the remark is made live, without the
editorial delay that print used to allow; and the third is that the debate
format encourages polarization, ensuring that the most inflammatory statement
receives the most screen time. The way in which the law has responded — by
bringing complaints under Section 295A and the corresponding provisions of the
Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita — is much the same as it was when it dealt with printed
pamphlets, but the psychological effect of the medium is different in that the
audience perceives the remark as an event rather than as a text, and this in
turn increases the sense of outrage.[5]
Social
Media and the Platform Revolution
The
shift brought about by digital technology in the media landscape has changed
the extent, speed, and way in which religious offence occurs more dramatically
than in any previous period. The existing body of research on social media in
India shows what happens. False information is created and spread via organised
WhatsApp networks or other social media networks. Systematic research into
misinformation on WhatsApp that is connected with mob violence throughout India
follows the journey of rumours from message to massacre, and mob lynchings
point to false information that was through WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter as
the immediate cause of the widespread panic which ends in people being killed .people
in India are highly susceptible to misinformation and it is difficult to
correct this even when educational interventions are targeted. Experimental
media psychology also provides an additional structural insight: video content
is processed in a more superficial way than text or audio, so people are more
likely to believe and to share it — this modalities effect has clear
consequences for the spread of offensive images of deities and prophets
B.
Meme culture and the response of online platforms
The
meme has emerged as a distinctive vehicle of religious offence. The Kali meme
controversy of 2015 is the paradigm: after outrage erupted over a meme
depicting the goddess Kali, the Government of India intervened and secured the
permanent suspension of the Twitter accounts of the content creator and of the
chief executive of Atheist Republic, whose "blasphemous art project"
combined gods and religious icons of various religions in depictions deemed
obscene. The Atheist Republic Facebook page remains banned in India — Pakistan
being the only other country to ban it — and the incident was cited in a
public-interest litigation before the Supreme Court as grounds to regulate
content shared on online platforms. Blasphemy controversies have thus become a
direct driver of platform regulation in India, foreshadowing the intermediary
regime that followed
C.
The Technological Frontier
The
next area to consider is synthetic media. Since deepfakes and harmful bots are
now capable of producing images of deities, prophets, and religious figures
that cannot be told apart from genuine ones, serious difficulties have arisen
concerning attribution, detection, and mens rea — when speech is generated by a
machine, the concept of "deliberate and malicious intention" becomes
questionable. The laws enacted in India were drawn up before such technologies
existed, and the legal framework that resulted from the invalidation of Section
66A is not well-suited to deal with these issues; indeed, the growing body of
academic work on online defamation and on platform liability is already being
put to the test by these developments [7]
V.
The legal framework that regulates media comments on religion
The
legal framework governing the treatment of religious matters by the Indian
media consists of three elements. The first of these is the constitutional
provision for freedom of speech and expression as stated in Article 19(1)(a),
with reasonable restrictions allowed, the courts having consistently required
that penal laws which limit speech be interpreted narrowly. The second element
is the substantive criminal law: Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code — which
has now been replaced by Section 299 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 —
criminalising deliberate and malicious acts intended to offend religious
feelings, together with the provisions concerning communal harmony in Section
153A (now Section 196) and the offence relating to wounding feelings under
Section 298 (now Section 302) The third
element is the regime specific to technology: the Information Technology Act,
where Section 66A was declared invalid in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India[8] on
the grounds of vagueness and arbitrariness following its routine misapplication
against citizens who were posting ordinary social media content and the safe-harbour provision in Section 79,
as clarified by the Information Technology Rules, 2021, according to which
intermediaries lose their immunity if they fail to meet the due-diligence
requirements.
The
overall impact on media discourse is a chilling effect that has been well
documented. Since the Shreya Singhal decision, regulation has shifted towards executive-led
control, and academic research cautions that the system set up to monitor
online speech puts civil liberties at risk in general in 2021. India has no
statutory definition of hate speech, which means enforcement is arbitrary and
leaves any defining law open to the same fate as Section 66A. Both journalists
and regular users have to live in the shadow of complaints made under the
religious-offence provisions: the most recent major case, Imran Pratapgadhi v.
State of Gujarat,[9] stemmed from a poem that
was recited at a public event and then posted on social media, and it led to a
first information report being filed under Sections 196, 197, 299, 302 and 57
of the BNS — the Supreme Court dismissed the case, stating that the poem
referred neither to a religion nor a community and did not promote hatred or
violence, and it issued a warning about the chilling effect of vague criminal
charges, as well as directing the police to carry out a preliminary inquiry
before filing any first information reports in cases involving speech [10]
VI.
The Media's Dual Role: That of Witness and That of an Accelerant
The
ethnographic evidence from India also includes media — especially smartphones
and social media sites — which now act both as witnesses to and as factors that
intensify blasphemy-related violence. According to Mukherjee's idea of
"mobile witnessing", vigilante violence in India is carried out for
the purpose of being seen and is spread through WhatsApp: the attacks are
filmed with the intention of sharing them, and the various groups coordinate
the actions. The camera does not just
record the offence; it gives the event a status, draws people into it, and
creates the legal consequences that follow.[11]
Conclusion
In India, media and blasphemy are closely linked: the concept of an
offence is based on communication, and every new phase in the media has changed
what the offence actually means. During the print era, Section 295A was
introduced along with the paradox of outrage being caused by the law; in the
broadcast era, there emerged controversies that were televised so that the
accusations and defences could be seen by a large audience; and in the current
platform era, we have seen virality, the spread of misinformation, provocation
driven by memes, and the shift of decision-making from the courts to private
intermediaries. The way the law has responded has been a constant
back-and-forth between yielding and restricting — this included the yield in
1927 in the face of organised agitation, the restriction of the incitement
threshold in the Shreya Singhal case, and the procedural oversight introduced
by Imran Pratapgadhi. The international standard provides the necessary
guidance: criminal punishment should only be applied in cases of incitement to
discrimination, hostility, or violence, as determined by the Rabat Plan of
Action's criteria of context, speaker, intent, content and form, the extent of
the audience, and the likelihood of harm. As for the media themselves, the lesson
from comparative experience is that the way they cover an issue has an impact
on how it is enforced; a responsible media environment — one that reports on
religious offences without making them worse — is therefore not just an ethical
goal but a fundamental requirement for the lawful and peaceful regulation of
blasphemy in India.
[1] Raj Pal v. King-Emperor AIR 1927
Lah. 590
[2] Sharma, A., & Waseem. (2024).
BLASPHEMY LEGISLATION IN INDIA: SPOTLIGHT ON PUNJAB’S NEW LAW AND ITS
IMPLICATIONS. NUJS Journal of Regulatory Studies., 9(2).
[3] Nash, D. B. (2020). Blasphemy
through British (post) colonial eyes. The Indian Criminal Code (pp. 66–82)
[4] Nupur Sharma v. Union of India
2022 SCC 1553
[5] Sharma, A., & Waseem. (2024).
BLASPHEMY LEGISLATION IN INDIA: SPOTLIGHT ON PUNJAB’S NEW LAW AND ITS
IMPLICATIONS. NUJS Journal of Regulatory Studies., 9(2).
[6] Aditya Singh Deshwal v. Union of
India & Ors. W.P.(CRL) No. 43/2022
[7] Shreya Singhal v. Union of India
is (2015) 5 SCC 1
[8] ibid
[9] 2025 INSC 410
[10] Thakkar, R. (2025). Legal
Responses to Online Hate Speech in India: Evaluating Section 66A and the
Supreme Court’s Judgment in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India. Studies in Law
and Justice, 4(3), 26–30
[11] Sundar, S. S., Molina, M. D.,
& Cho, E. (2021). Seeing Is Believing: Is Video Modality More Powerful in
Spreading Fake News via Online Messaging Apps? Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication, 26(6), 301–319
How to Cite This Article
ANJU R V, IMPACT OF MEDIA IN BLASPHEMY: FROM THE PRINT PUBLIC SPHERE TO THE PLATFORM ECONOMY IN INDIA., White Black Legal – International Law Journal, ISSN: 2581-8503, Vol. Volume 4, Issue VOLUME 4 ISSUE 1, September 2026, pp. 987-996. Available at: https://www.whiteblacklegal.co.in/details/impact-of-media-in-blasphemy-from-the-print-public-sphere-to-the-platform-economy-in-india
Author & Publication Record
Authors: ANJU R V
Registration ID: 107114 | Published Paper ID: WBL7114
Year: Sep- 2026 | Volume: 4 | Issue: 1
Approved ISSN: 2581-8503 | Country: Delhi, India
Page No.: 987-996
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