This question sits at the centre of a recent Madras High Court judgment in which the court upheld the Central Board of Film Certification’s refusal to certify the Tamil film Lakshmi Lawrence Kadhal. By the court’s own account, the film is an interfaith romance. Lakshmi is a Hindu nursing

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LawWhen Religious Discomfort Becomes a Licence to Censor
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V. Venkatesan14 hours ago
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Upholding the ban on a Tamil interfaith romance, the Madras high court turned anticipated religious offence into constitutional harm, stretching Article 19(2) beyond its text.
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What threat to India’s social fabric arises when a Bharatanatyam dancer performs to Christian devotional music?

This question sits at the centre of a recent Madras High Court judgment in which the court upheld the Central Board of Film Certification’s refusal to certify the Tamil film Lakshmi Lawrence Kadhal. By the court’s own account, the film is an interfaith romance. Lakshmi is a Hindu nursing student and Bharatanatyam dancer, while Lawrence is a medical student who sings Christian songs. Their relationship draws opposition from Lakshmi’s father and uncle.

The detail that troubled the censor, and then the court, is narrow: Lawrence repeatedly asks Lakshmi to perform Bharatanatyam to his Christian songs. Because that premise recurs through the film, the court said that cuts could not cure it and affirmed a complete bar on exhibition. The producers argued the opposite, maintaining that the dance form is universal, owned by no single faith and open to all.

Justice R. Kalaimathi decided on the case, titled “Youreka Cinema School v Chairman, Central Board of Film Certification,” on April 28, 2026, after watching the entire film herself.

The judgment opens generously. It affirms free speech, artistic liberty, secularism and the Supreme Court’s defence of provocative expression. Its conclusion, however, runs the other way. It gives legal weight to the presumed discomfort of a religious community, invokes citizens’ fundamental duties to curtail a film-maker’s fundamental right and accepts a vague appeal to the “social fabric” as a warrant for an outright ban.

The result is a dangerous precedent. It lets the state patrol cultural and religious boundaries without finding incitement, disorder or any harm the constitution recognises.

A new censorship ground
Article 19(1)(a) guarantees free speech. Article 19(2) permits the state to restrict it on the following listed grounds: public order, decency, morality, defamation, contempt of court and incitement to an offence. “Cultural and religious beliefs and practices” is not among them. Protection of the “social fabric” is not an independent ground either.

Section 5B(1) of the Cinematograph Act reproduces the Article 19(2) grounds almost verbatim. The certification guidelines, framed under the act, bar visuals or words contemptuous of racial, religious or other groups. This guideline cannot float free of its parent statute and the constitution; it must answer to one of the permitted grounds mentioned in Article 19(2).

The Examining Committee found that the film treated cultural and religious beliefs in a manner that supposedly breached the guideline. The Revising Committee went further, holding that the film showed one belief system in poor light and another as emancipatory, thereby harming the society’s social fabric. Neither committee identified a danger to public order nor found incitement. Additionally, the judgment records no threatened violence, no communal mobilisation, no probable disturbance from the film’s release and does not address why an adult viewer cannot watch the film and judge it for themselves.

Instead, the court reasons that members of a particular sect may find it hard to accept portrayals touching their beliefs and practices, inverting the constitutional question. The test under Article 19(2) is whether expression causes a harm closely tied to a listed ground, not whether a community finds a portrayal hard to accept.

Once unease becomes the trigger, almost any work that examines religion, caste, gender or custom is at risk. A film against a discriminatory ritual can be cast as showing a faith in poor light. A novel on conversion can be said to disturb practice. A play on patriarchy can be accused of fraying a community’s bonds. Constitutional protection earns its keep precisely when expression unsettles.

Fundamental duties cannot enlarge Article 19(2)
The use of Article 51A is the judgment’s gravest move. Article 51A(e) asks citizens to promote harmony across religious and sectional lines, while 51A(f) asks them to value India’s composite culture. The court reads these duties alongside the Preamble and Article 19, speaks of “constitutional dharma” and recalls B.R. Ambedkar’s stance on liberty, equality and fraternity as one trinity.

Lakshmi Lawrence Kadhal poster, Photo: Instagram/@srishtidigilife.

These are real constitutional values. They cannot, however, become fresh grounds for curbing a fundamental right. In “Kaushal Kishor v State of Uttar Pradesh,” a constitution bench held that the Article 19(2) grounds are exhaustive and that restrictions cannot be added by importing other fundamental rights. Any restriction outside the four corners of Article 19(2), the court said, is unconstitutional. If even a fundamental right cannot enlarge that list, a non-justiciable duty plainly cannot.

Article 51A may shape civic conduct and help choose between two readings of a statute. But it cannot license the suppression of speech that lies outside Article 19(2).

The judgment also gives “composite culture” an oddly preservationist cast. Composite culture grows through contact, borrowing and reinterpretation. Bharatanatyam set to Christian devotional music is itself a picture of that mingling; whether the result is graceful or clumsy is a question for criticism. The constitution does not ask the state to settle it by prohibition. A duty to preserve culture is not a mandate to keep cultural forms within approved religious lines – this approach freezes culture rather than preserves it.

Fraternity yields the same contradiction. It asks citizens of different faiths to live as equals despite disagreement. It does not grant any community immunity from artistic treatment. A constitution that prizes fraternity should invite counter-speech and coexistence, not treat offence as proof that speech must vanish.

An anticipatory heckler’s veto
The Supreme Court has long refused the heckler’s veto, the silencing of lawful speech because others may react with hostility.

“Rangarajan v P. Jagjivan Ram” was filed in Tamil Nadu over the film Ore Oru Gramathile. The court had held that protected speech cannot be held hostage to the threat of agitation and that the state’s duty is to shield the speaker, not to reward the disrupter. In “Indibily Creative v Government of West Bengal,” concerning the satire Bhobishyoter Bhoot, the court warned that art becomes the casualty when acceptability is set by organised sentiment. Most recently, “Imran Pratapgarhi v State of Gujarat” held that disliked views must be met by other views and that the standard is the firm and courageous person.

The Madras high court cites this lineage and then applies the standard those cases rejected. No heckler stood before it. The court instead presumed that a sect would not accept the film’s portrayals and made that presumed reaction the reason to bar it. That is a heckler’s veto granted in advance, an offence veto issued before any audience has had the opportunity to comment.

The judgment is also at war with itself. It states correctly that a film must be judged as a whole, through the eyes of an ordinary viewer. When it applies the law, it switches to the imagined response of a sensitive believer. The ordinary, reasonable viewer gives way to the most easily wounded one, the precise inversion that the Rangarajan and Imran Pratapgarhi cases warned against.

Deference where scrutiny was required
The court owes the censor some deference. To its credit, the judge did not rely on the record alone and watched the film before deciding. Yet, independent viewing did not become independent scrutiny. The court records that the board is “more conscious” of the need to protect citizens’ religious and cultural beliefs, a framing that casts the CBFC as a guardian of orthodoxy rather than a statutory body bound by fundamental rights. Expertise in assessing films does not settle the constitutional limits of censorship; that task belongs to the court.

Scrutiny matters most where the state imposes a prior restraint. A refusal certificate keeps a film from every screen, touching the producer, the director, the performers and the audience alike. Such a bar demands compelling and specific reasons.

Furthermore, the judgment names proportionality but never performs it. It leans on “Om Kumar v Union of India” for deference, while that decision reserves closer scrutiny for restrictions on fundamental freedoms. The court quotes the deferential half and leaves the rest and does not fix the legitimate aim the ban serves. It does not show a rational link between the film’s content and a probable public-order harm and does not weigh classification, disclaimers or restricted exhibition against an outright ban.

The necessity inquiry shrinks to one question: whether scenes can be cut. Since the theme runs throughout, the court finds excision impossible and the ban inevitable. This logic makes the centrality of an idea the reason to suppress it, the more essential a contested idea is to a work, the easier the work becomes to ban. In substance, this is viewpoint discrimination.

The reasons on the file were thin. The court itself notes that the board’s refusal ran to a few lines. It even leans on “Sitar Video v State of Uttar Pradesh” to treat film exhibition as mere commerce and wrongly attributes that Allahabad high court ruling (misspelling the petitioner as “Star Video”) to the Supreme Court. The judge then supplied, from her own viewing, the detailed reasons the board never gave and upheld the order on that basis.

The right to criticise belief
Indian law allows the prior certification of films. “K.A. Abbas v Union of India” ruled in its favour, citing cinema’s reach and immediacy. That same judgment required the censor to make a substantial allowance in favour of freedom, leaving a wide field for creative art. The Madras high court’s ruling keeps the power and forgets the allowance.

The power to certify is not a power to shield faiths from unflattering comparison. Freedom of religion protects belief and practice within constitutional limits. However, it carries no matching right to stop others from examining or reworking religion.

Lakshmi Lawrence Kadhal may well be crude, partisan or poorly made and some viewers may find its images unfair. Those are reasons to argue, not to ban. A constitutional prohibition asks for far more.

The judgment matters well beyond one small film. Its method hands censors a reusable template: find a sensitive religious portrayal, assert harm to social harmony, invoke fundamental duties, then defer to the board. Applied widely, this template can reach far past cinema, into novels, plays and ordinary commentary.

Religious harmony cannot mean the absence of criticism, reinterpretation or cultural crossing. Rather, it means a plural society’s capacity to bear them. The judgment deserves reconsideration, otherwise a guarantee meant to protect unsettling speech will hold only when those most likely to be unsettled allow it.

The writer is Contributing Editor at Supreme Court Observer. The views are his own.

This article went live on June twenty-eighth, two thousand twenty six, at fifty-three minutes past four in the afternoon.
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