Beyond Courtrooms and Street Violence

Rethinking Religious Offence and Its Containment

Vera Lazzaretti, Kathinka Frøystad, Vera Lazzaretti, Kathinka Frøystad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000622195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de la India y el sur de Asia

Much of the scholarship dealing with religious offence in South Asia focuses on the unintended effects of blasphemy laws, showing, for instance, that laws presumably intended to promote religious tolerance end up informing, if not encouraging, disputes around religious sensitivities. But while debates about the effects of law are crucial, this collection widens the scope of the enquiry by suggesting that a more nuanced understanding of religious offence can be gained by looking past full-blown legal proceedings and the spectacular violence performed in the streets during religious offence controversies. Drawing on the extensive empirical field research of six scholars of religion and politics, this book directs attention to frictions around religious sensitivities that are handled and often mitigated locally—either entirely outside the courts or through bottom-up initiatives that unfold in combination with, or as a reaction to, top-down measures. While documenting a range of containment modalities in diverse geographical and socio-religious settings in India and scrutinising their functioning and outcomes, the book is a first attempt to bridge research on religious offence with critical understandings of peace and scholarship on the micro-mechanisms of coexistence.

Beyond Courtrooms and Street Violence is a significant new contribution to the study of religion, politics and communities in India, and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Anthropology, History, Politics, Cultural Studies, and Sociology.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.

OPEN ACCESS

Rethinking religious offence and its containment: towards a new research agenda

Kathinka Frøystad and Vera Lazzaretti

ABSTRACT

In this introduction, we situate the special section, ‘Containing Religious Offence beyond the Courts’, within and beyond existing scholarship on religious offence in South Asia. Much of this scholarship focuses on the unintended effects of blasphemy laws, showing, for instance, that laws presumably intended to promote religious tolerance end up informing, if not encouraging, disputes around religious sensitivities. But while debates about the effects of law are crucial, we suggest that a more nuanced understanding of religious offence can be gained if we look past full-blown legal proceedings and the spectacular violence performed in the streets during religious offence controversies. This collection, then, directs attention to the friction around religious sensitivities that are handled and often mitigated locally—either entirely outside the courts or through bottom-up initiatives that unfold in combination with, or as a reaction to, top-down measures. Drawing on the extensive empirical field research of six scholars of religion and politics, these essays document existing containment modalities in diverse geographical and socio-religious settings in India and critically scrutinise their functioning and outcomes. They explicitly engage with critical understandings of peace and with scholarship on the micro-mechanism of coexistence and, in so doing, open up new avenues of enquiry about religious offence.

Multireligious societies are replete with events that may trigger crisis. A transgressive image here, the odour of taboo cooking there, blaring loudspeakers during prayer time, sexualised puns about deities and holy figures, accidental stepping on paper scraps with holy names on them, or merely the incorporation of inappropriate ritual elements—all exemplify situations that can be construed as religious offence and can trigger legal proceedings, threats, vigilantism or even violence.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

Across South Asia, such events have become focal points of a marked rise in religious offence controversies in recent decades. Not only has this resulted in a steady increase in First Information Reports (FIRs) and court cases, but a worrisome number of threats and violent attacks have also been carried out against those who are blamed for them and, occasionally, against those who defend them as well.

The current escalation of religious offence controversies could hardly have been foreseen by Macaulay and the other colonial lawmakers who initiated the proscription of religious offences in the mid nineteenth century.¹ In their eyes, we assume, proscription would move conflict from the streets to the courts and thus protect the social order and enhance governability. Later lawmakers evidently shared this conviction because the criminalisation of religious offences has since been expanded. The colonial government added Section 295A or s.295A (insulting religious beliefs) in 1927, and the Indian government extended s.153A (promoting disharmony) in the 1960s, while Pakistan’s General Zia-ul-Haq strengthened the criminalisation of offences against Islam in the 1980s. In the following decades, the region grew increasingly religiously polarised both within and between state boundaries. It also experienced steadily-rising political participation, mediatisation and digital connectivity. All this has resulted in the amplification of controversies; consequently, the hope that legal proscription would curb religious offence is being increasingly called into question.

Much of the existing scholarship on religious offence, indeed, focuses on the unintended and dangerous effect of blasphemy laws, showing that laws that aimed to inculcate religious tolerance and prevent religious offence controversies increasingly encourage such disputes instead.² Although there are many reasons why the ability to display wounded feelings became part of a ‘politics of self-expression’,³ legal proscription seems to have enabled claims of hurt to metamorphose into a sense of entitlement that prompts agency, as recently argued by Zecchini.⁴ Today people who claim that someone has hurt their religious feelings routinely describe their sense of hurt using phrases taken verbatim from the law, often combined with an elaborate dramatisation of their emotionality.⁵ In other words, the law has been shown to have a palpable recursive effect on religious sensitivities.

1 For details about the origins of the proscription of religious offence in the colonial Indian Penal Code (IPC) and the transformation of blasphemy laws in the various South Asian post-colonial countries, see Paul Rollier et al., ‘Introduction: Researching the Rise of Religious Offence in South Asia’, in Paul Rollier et al. (eds), Outrage: The Rise of Religious Offence in South Asia (London: UCL Press, 2020), pp. 1–47. 2 This point has been made by a number of scholars, including Christopher Pinney, ‘Iatrogenic Religion and Politics’, in Raminder Kaur and William Mazzarella (eds), Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), pp. 29–62; C.S. Adcock, ‘Violence, Passion, and the Law: A Brief History of Section 295A and Its Antecedents’, in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 84, no. 2 (April 2016), pp. 337–51; Brian K. Pennington, ‘The Unseen Hand of an Underappreciated Law: The Doniger Affair and Its Aftermath’, in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 84, no. 2 (April 2016), pp. 323–6; and Rina Ramdev et al., ‘Sentimental Sovereignties: Hurt and the Political Unconscious’, in Rina Ramdev et al. (eds), Sentiment, Politics, Censorship: The State of Hurt (New Delhi: Sage, 2016), pp. xv–xliii. 3 See, for example, Markus Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression: The Urdu Middle-Class Milieu in Mid-Twentieth Century India and Pakistan (London: Routledge, 2006); and Margrit Pernau, ‘The Virtuous Individual and Social Reform: Debates among North Indian Urdu Speakers’, in Margrit Pernau et al. (eds), Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth-Century Asia and Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 169–96. 4 Laetitia Zecchini, ‘Hurt and Censorship in India Today: On Communities of Sentiments, Competing Vulnerabilities and Cultural Wars’, in Amélie Blom and Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal (eds), Emotions, Mobilisations and South Asian Politics (Oxford: Routledge, 2020), pp. 243–63; for a similar point, see also Ramdev et al., ‘Sentimental Sovereignties’, p. xxi. 5 For a poignant example, see Asad Ali Ahmed, ‘Specters of Macaulay: Blasphemy, the Indian Penal Code, and Pakistan’s Postcolonial Predicament’, in Raminder Kaur and William Mazzarella (eds), Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), pp. 172–205.

These lines of research highlight patterns in the unfolding of the religious offence controversies brought to the courts and, importantly, reveal that these controversies are not necessarily forgotten when the mediatised noise and legal proceedings come to an end. In Ahmed’s terms, they continue to be ‘sticky’ inasmuch as they are saturated with affects and come to flavour the interpretation of subsequent events.⁶ This often results in an enduring hermeneutics of suspicion that makes the aggrieved party scout actively for repeated religious insults, ultimately generating a never-ending cycle of perceived offences, accusations, critique and intervention.⁷

Despite the crucial contributions of the above-mentioned scholarship, though, we believe that these lines of enquiry—particularly those focusing on full-blown and mediatised legal controversies—highlight only the tip of the iceberg, and unwittingly overlook the innumerable alleged religious offences that are handled in such a way that they never reach the courts, police stations, streets or media. These alleged and potential offences, as we call them here, are sometimes resolved fairly easily; at other times, they are not, increasing the risk of the legal and political mediation that by now has become so dominant in the academic archive (more on this below). This special section, then, contributes to the crucial debate about the rise of religious offence controversies and the violence they increasingly afford by looking beyond the full-blown and highly mediatised legal controversies that usually attract the attention of scholars of religious offence. We suggest that frictions around religious sensitivities are still often handled and often mitigated locally—either without involving the legal system or by a combination of top-down and bottom-up measures that may or may not work in tandem. A critical examination of these alternative modalities of containment and their functioning on the ground, we argue, adds nuance to our understanding of religious offence and widens the imaginative horizon needed when dealing with the question of how the rise of religious offence controversies may be addressed and challenged.

Critiques of the blasphemy laws

As shown by the some of the above-mentioned scholarship, the gap between intention and effect of legal measures to contain religious offence has widened and vigilantes increasingly take the law into their own hands, making conflict return to the streets. This generative, unpredictable and open-ended nature of legal proscription has led some scholars to suggest that blasphemy legislation should be reconsidered and perhaps abolished, as many Western countries have recently done.⁸ In India, such suggestions are primarily directed at s.295A and s.153A on the grounds that they are too wide-ranging and prone to misuse.⁹ In Pakistan, comparable arguments first and foremost target s.295C (insulting the Prophet) due to its sweeping inclusivity, indifference to intentionality and mandatory death penalty, though they are also directed at the anti-Ahmadi laws.¹⁰

6 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2015). 7 Particularly on this, see Ali Hussain Agrama, ‘Religious Freedom and the Bind of Suspicion in Contemporary Secularity’, in Winnifred Fallers Sullivan et al. (eds), Politics of Religious Freedom (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2015), pp. 301–12. 8 Western countries or regions that have abolished their blasphemy legislation in recent decades include the UK (2008), the US state of Pennsylvania (2010), Norway (2015), France’s Alsace region (2016), Denmark (2018) and Canada (2018). Germany, Switzerland and Australia have so far retained blasphemy legislations though they are hardly used. 9 Particularly pertinent was a 2014 petition by well-known academics to make the Indian parliament ‘reconsider and revise’ s.153A and s.295A following a demand to make Penguin India pulp its remaining copies of Wendy Doniger’s book, Hindus: An Alternative History: see Ananya Vajpeyi et al., ‘Protect Freedom of Expression’, Outlook (14 Feb. 2014) [https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/protect-freedom-of-expression/289535, accessed 11 Nov. 2020]; but see also Gautam Bhatia, Offend, Shock, or Disturb: Free Speech under the Indian Constitution (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 328–32; Alok Prasanna Kumar, ‘Kiku Sharda’s Arrest Should Prompt the SC to Rethink Sec. 295A’, The Quint (14 Jan. 2016) [https://www.thequint.com/news/india/kiku-shardas-arrest-should-prompt-the-sc-to-rethink-sec-295a, accessed 13 Nov. 2020]; and Human Rights Watch, ‘Stifling Dissent: The Criminalization of Peaceful Expression in India’ (May 2016), p. 102 [https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/india0516.pdf, accessed 13 Nov. 2020]. 10 Such arguments have been made in an impressive number of books, articles and reports published internationally, including Osama Siddique and Zahra Hayat, ‘Unholy Speech and Holy Laws: Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan: Controversial Origins, Design Defects, and Free Speech Implications’, in Minnesota Journal of International Law, Vol. 17, no. 2 (2008), pp. 303–86; Bilal Hayee, ‘Blasphemy Laws and Pakistan’s Human Rights Obligations’, in University of Notre Dame Australia Law Review, Vol. 14 (Dec. 2012), pp. 25–53; Shemeem Burney Abbas, Pakistan’s Blasphemy Laws: From Islamic Empires to the Taliban (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013); Amjad Mahmood Khan, ‘Pakistan’s Anti-Blasphemy Laws and the Illegitimate Use of the “Law, Public Order and Morality” Limitation on Constitutional Rights’, in The Review of Faith & International Affairs, Vol. 13, no. 1 (Feb. 2015), pp. 13–22; and Faisal Kutty, ‘Blasphemy and Apostasy Laws in the Muslim World: A Critical Analysis’, in Nadirsyah Hosen (ed.), Research Handbook on Islamic Law and Society (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2018), pp. 217–49.

But revising the law is an uphill task. Lawmaking is done by parliaments and the wait for a sufficient political majority can be long, even if there is intense lobbying for the cause. In Pakistan it is not even safe to advocate a revision of the most controversial blasphemy legislation any more, as suggested by the assassinations of Salman Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti in 2011, the passionate protests against Asia Bibi’s acquittal in 2018 and the spectacular growth of the far right Islamist Tehreek-e-Labbaik party, at least until it was banned in April 2021.¹¹ Another possibility is to work for a speedy acquittal for those held to be unfairly charged for religious offence. In India, this...