In case after case, the person prosecuted under Bangladesh's blasphemy statute is the alleged author of an insult — while the person who gathered a mob around that claim walks away untouched. A closer reading of a century-old law suggests the courts have been aiming it at the wrong person all along.
On the evening of 18 December 2025, a rumor moved through a garment factory in Bhaluka, in central Bangladesh: a young factory worker had supposedly said something insulting about Islam. Within two hours, a crowd of several hundred had gathered outside the factory gate. It grew past a thousand. Police arrived and could not get the worker out safely. A side gate opened. He was beaten, dragged more than a kilometer through the streets, tied to a tree, and set on fire in front of hundreds of onlookers.
Investigators from Bangladesh's Rapid Action Battalion later reported something striking: they could find no one who had actually heard the alleged insult. No witness. No recording. No confirmed post. There was, in the investigators' own account, no evidence the remark was ever made at all.
There was a rumor, a crowd, and a fire. There was no author.
This is not a one-off tragedy. It is close to the standard pattern of the modern blasphemy incident in Bangladesh, and it exposes something worth taking seriously about how the underlying law is being used. Section 295A of the Penal Code, inherited from British India, unchanged in its essential wording since 1927, punishes anyone who, "with deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of any class," insults or attempts to insult a religion "by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representations." The maximum sentence is two years.
Read plainly, almost every element of that sentence is satisfied by the person who assembles the crowd: the person who prints a screenshot, projects it, reads it aloud over a loudspeaker, or forwards it to thousands of people with the specific aim of provoking outrage. It is almost never satisfied, in the same way, by whoever is alleged to have made the original remark privately, to a small circle, with no apparent intention of reaching a crowd at all.
In practice, the law runs in exactly the opposite direction. The alleged original speaker is the one who gets charged, jailed, or in the worst cases killed. The person who gathered the crowd, distributed the claim, and set the confrontation in motion is, overwhelmingly, never prosecuted at all.
That inversion is not required by the law's history. Section 295A was added to the Indian Penal Code in 1927, in the aftermath of a specific controversy: a court had acquitted the publisher of an inflammatory pamphlet about the Prophet Muhammad on the grounds that the existing law didn't clearly apply, and the acquittal triggered mass protest. The colonial government's own legislative debates, since studied closely by historians, make its actual purpose explicit. As one member of the drafting committee put it at the time, the law was needed to control "the man in the street", not to vindicate any particular religious doctrine, but to give the state a tool for defusing crowds before they turned violent.
Later courts in the region have upheld the law only on this same "public order" basis, not as a doctrine-protection statute, but as a narrow tool against speech that is genuinely likely to trigger imminent unrest. Strip away that public-order justification, and the law has no constitutional footing left to stand on.
Four documented episodes, spanning more than a decade, show the same shape:
In three of these four cases, the thing the law imagines itself to be punishing, a real, deliberate act of religious insult, appears not to have happened at all. In every case, the harm was generated entirely at the amplification stage: nobody's temple burned because a private post existed somewhere; temples burned because a claim about a post was carried to an assembled crowd. And in every case, the people who did the carrying have faced little to no legal consequence. Human rights monitors place impunity rates for communal violence of this kind in Bangladesh above ninety percent.
A statute that consistently produces the harm it was written to prevent is not being applied correctly.
None of this requires Parliament to rewrite a single word of the Penal Code. The argument is narrower: courts already have everything they need, in the law as currently written, to prosecute the person who builds the crowd rather than the person the crowd is angry at.
Consider what the statute actually requires: a "deliberate and malicious intention" to outrage the feelings of "a class" of people, carried out "by words... or by visible representations." A private post to a small circle of contacts does not reach a class of people, it reaches individuals. What converts a private message into a public, class-directed provocation is precisely the act of the person who prints it, projects it, reads it aloud to a congregation, or forwards it to a mass audience with the specific intent of provoking a reaction. That person's conduct, choosing inflammatory material, choosing a receptive audience, choosing a moment and a medium calculated to maximize outrage, is deliberate in exactly the sense the statute requires. The original, private speaker's conduct usually is not.
The Bangladesh Penal Code already has a well-developed vocabulary for exactly this kind of conduct: provisions on abetment and on inciting an assembled crowd, which apply whether or not the underlying claim is even true. Common-law systems have long treated deliberately republishing a damaging claim to a wider audience as its own independent wrong, not a lesser echo of someone else's. And courts across South Asia have shown, in unrelated areas of law, workplace harassment, extra-judicial religious rulings, that they are willing to read old, unamended statutes in light of a modern understanding of what the words actually require, without waiting for new legislation.
A reading of the law along these lines would not create any new restriction on speech. It would not protect anyone who genuinely sets out to insult a religious community and reaches one. It would narrow, rather than expand, who can be charged, removing the ordinary private poster from the law's reach entirely, in favor of a much smaller, more clearly defined class of people: those who deliberately select inflammatory material and place it in front of a crowd in order to provoke exactly the reaction that follows. Journalists reporting on a controversy, scholars quoting a text under study, and investigators or complainants presenting evidence to a court would all remain outside it, just as they are meant to be under the law as written today.
What it would change is where the state's attention falls after the fact. At Bhaluka, there was no author to punish, because no one could find the words the crowd said it was avenging. There was a rumor, an amplifier, and a fire. A law that reaches only the rumor's supposed source, and never its amplifier, is not protecting anyone's religion. It is subsidizing the fire.