For a woman of menstruating age, entry into the Sabarimala temple in Kerala has been legal since 2018 and, in practice, fraught ever since. The Supreme Court's verdict that year said the centuries-old exclusion of women aged roughly ten to fifty violated their constitutional rights. Review petitions followed almost immediately, and rather than simply re-deciding Sabarimala, the Court in 2019 folded the case into a nine-judge Bench tasked with a far bigger question: how should courts decide, at all, which religious practices the Constitution protects and which it can override? That Bench has now spent sixteen hearing days examining the issue and has reserved its verdict — a decision years in the making that will ripple well beyond one temple in Kerala.
What happened
The nine-judge Constitution Bench has been hearing arguments on what is formally called the Sabarimala Reference — a batch of questions referred by the Court itself concerning the interplay between individual fundamental rights, religious denominations' rights to manage their own affairs, and the judiciary's power to test religious practices against constitutional guarantees. Over the course of the hearings, the Union government, through the Solicitor General, has argued for judicial restraint in reforming religious practice from the bench, cautioning against courts substituting their own view of what a faith "truly" requires. The Travancore Devaswom Board, which administers the temple, has defended the restriction as an essential part of the temple's distinct religious character tied to the deity's celibate form, framing it as a protective practice rather than discriminatory exclusion. Petitioners supporting the 2018 verdict, meanwhile, have pressed the Court to hold firm on the principle that constitutional morality and individual dignity cannot bow to institutional religious practice. Alongside Sabarimala, the reference has drawn in related disputes — including questions about the entry of Muslim women into mosques and Parsi women married outside the faith into fire temples — because all raise the same underlying doctrinal question. With the Bench reserving judgment, a written verdict is now awaited, likely to be a lengthy and layered opinion given the number of judges and the constitutional ground covered.
The law behind it
At the centre of the dispute sit two adjoining but distinct guarantees. Article 25 gives every person freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion, but subjects this right to public order, morality, health and the other fundamental rights — and expressly permits the State to regulate secular activity associated with religious practice and to throw open Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all classes and sections of Hindus. Article 26 gives every religious denomination the right to manage its own affairs in matters of religion, independent of Article 25(2)'s throwing-open clause. The tension between these two provisions is the crux of the reference: does a temple's claim under Article 26 to manage "matters of religion" trump an individual worshipper's claim under Article 25 to freely practise her faith by entering the temple?
Courts have long tried to resolve this tension using the "essential religious practices" test — asking whether a contested practice is so fundamental to a religion that removing it would change the religion's basic character. If a practice is found essential, it gets Article 26 protection from State interference; if not, it can be regulated or struck down like any other social practice. Critics argue this test forces judges into an inherently theological inquiry — deciding, as outsiders, what a faith "really" requires — which sits uneasily with the Court's civil, secular role. This is exactly the ground the Solicitor General's arguments occupy: pressing the Court to draw a line beyond which judicial reform of religious practice should not go, leaving such questions to legislatures, religious bodies, or evolving social consensus instead.
Running alongside the essential practices debate are the equality guarantees. Article 14 guarantees equality before the law; Article 15 prohibits discrimination on grounds including sex; and Article 17 abolishes untouchability in any form. The 2018 majority verdict controversially invoked Article 17 by treating the exclusion of women as a form of the same social stigma the framers intended untouchability to abolish, an interpretive move that itself drew criticism for stretching a provision historically understood in the context of caste. Whether the nine-judge Bench endorses, narrows or departs from that reading is one of the more consequential unresolved questions in this reference.
Procedurally, the case also tests how the Supreme Court exercises its own institutional powers. Article 137 gives the Court power to review its own judgments — the review petitions against the 2018 verdict are what set this reference in motion. Article 145 permits the Court to frame rules of procedure, including the requirement that questions involving substantial interpretation of the Constitution be heard by a Bench of at least five judges; the decision to escalate this to nine judges reflects the scale of doctrinal review at stake. And Article 141 — under which law declared by the Supreme Court binds all courts in India — is what gives whatever the Bench eventually holds nationwide, cross-religion effect, well beyond the facts of one temple.
How we got here
The essential religious practices test itself was developed by the Supreme Court decades before Sabarimala, as courts grappled with disputes over temple management, religious processions, and practices claimed to be integral to particular faiths. Over the years it produced inconsistent results — some practices upheld as essential with minimal scrutiny, others struck down as social accretions rather than core religious tenets — leading many scholars to argue the test lacked a coherent methodology and let judges' personal views on "authentic" religion shape outcomes.
The 2018 Sabarimala verdict brought this tension to a head. A majority of the Bench held that the exclusion of women was not an essential practice of the temple's worship and that, in any event, individual dignity and equality under Articles 14, 15 and 25 could not be subordinated to a claimed denominational right under Article 26. A dissenting opinion took the opposing view, arguing that courts should be slow to override a religious community's own understanding of its practices absent clear constitutional harm. The intensity of the public reaction, including protests and enforcement difficulties on the ground even after the verdict, was part of what led the Court, while hearing review petitions, to conclude that the underlying doctrinal question deserved authoritative resolution by a larger Bench rather than repeated case-by-case litigation over individual temples and denominations.
What it means in practice
For ordinary worshippers, the immediate practical question — can women of any age enter Sabarimala — remains where the 2018 judgment left it unless and until the nine-judge Bench says otherwise; a reserved judgment does not itself change the operative legal position. For religious institutions across faiths, the eventual ruling will set the framework for future challenges to gender-based or caste-based restrictions on entry, worship or office-holding, since the same essential-practices logic recurs in disputes involving mosques, fire temples, and other denominational management questions bundled into this reference. For law students and exam aspirants, this case is a foundational study in balancing competing fundamental rights, the scope of judicial review over religious practice, and the institutional mechanics of large Constitution Benches — themes tested repeatedly in constitutional law papers and interviews.
What to watch
The Bench's written verdict, once delivered, is likely to address not only the specific Sabarimala dispute but the broader test to be applied to essential religious practices claims going forward — whether it retains the existing framework, refines it, or replaces it with a different balancing approach between Articles 25 and 26 on one hand and Articles 14, 15 and 17 on the other. It is worth watching whether the Court addresses the linked mosque-entry and fire-temple disputes together or hives them off for separate consideration, and whether the judgment attempts to lay down general principles binding on all future religious-practice litigation under Article 141, or confines itself more narrowly to the facts referred. Until the verdict is delivered, any assumption about the outcome would be premature.