Sabarimala Reference: ’Marriage as a basis of classification is discriminatory against women’, Justice Nagarathna on Parsi woman’s exclusion from agiary
While the Indian Young Lawyers' Association struggled to justify its standing before the Court, Senior Advocate Darius Khambata, appearing for a Parsi Zoroastrian woman denied entry into the agiary after marrying a Hindu man, argued that no religion can strip a believing woman of her faith simply because she married outside her community.
Ananya Gunjan
Published on: 6 May 2026, 01:10 pm
YESTERDAY, the Sabarimala reference before the nine-judge Constitution Bench opened with submissions by Advocate Ravi Prakash Gupta, appearing for the Indian Young Lawyers’ Association, the petitioner whose petition originally precipitated the 2018 Sabarimala judgment. The day’s proceedings, however, took a sharp turn almost immediately, as the Bench trained its attention less on the merits of his arguments and more on the threshold question of whether his client had any standing to be heard at all.
‘Superstition cannot be permitted in the name of religion’: Senior Advocate Gupta
Gupta drew from a Devaprasnam publication to submit that young women were not permitted to visit the Sabarimala temple, remarking that the “deity does not like young ladies entering the temple.” The submission drew pointed scrutiny from Justice B.V. Nagarathna, who pressed Gupta on the locus standi of the Indian Young Lawyers’ Association to maintain a petition before the Court. She suggested that the Association’s proper role was not to advance a cause as a party. Gupta was also posed with the question concerning the status of registration of the association which was affirmed by him as a validly registered association. When the Bench enquired whether the Association had passed any resolution authorising the filing of the petition, Gupta confirmed that no such resolution existed. The lack of existence of any resolution drew a note of disapproval from Justice B.V. Nagarathna as she reiterated upon the unbefittingness of the Association’s involvement in filing the PIL.
The difficulties did not end there. Justice Aravind Kumar remained visibly unconvinced by Gupta’s characterisation of Lord Ayyappa as a ‘Buddhist’ deity. The Bench pushed back firmly on the logic of basing the deity’s religious character on one counsel’s characterisation, particularly when that characterisation ran contrary to the prevailing understanding of Ayyappa’s place within the Hindu tradition.
Gupta also submitted that “the interplay of Articles 25 and Article 26 would not help the Bench,” a position he sought to buttress by reference to the Chief Justice’s judgment in Aligarh Muslim University v. Naresh Agarwal (2024) in which, according to Gupta, the Court had grappled not only with the minority status of the institution but with a jurisdictional question, a reference having been made directly from a three-judge bench to a seven-judge bench. On the basis of this, Gupta posed the question of whether an eleven-judge bench could be constituted to overrule a three-judge bench, and pressed for a formal guideline governing such references. Justice Nagarathna was unpersuaded that such a submission was germane to the present proceedings, given that no such reference had taken place here.
