District Collector v. P. Naveen Kumar: a single judge cannot nullify a division bench

The facts in brief

Sri Sadhasiva Brahmendral is a revered saint whose Jeeva Samadhi is at Nerur Village, Manmangalam Taluk, Karur District. On his Samadhi-day observances, devotees traditionally perform Annadhanam — communal feeding — and the practice of Angapradakshinam, in which devotees roll their bodies over the plantain leaves left behind by other devotees who have eaten.

The practice had been litigated before. A division bench of the Madras High Court had taken a view of it, and the matter was entangled with a long-running line of cases traceable to W.P.(MD) No. 7068 of 2015, and with the broader, constitutionally fraught controversy over similar rituals in Karnataka — the rolling-over-leaves practice associated with made-snana — which is pending before the Supreme Court.

In 2024, the Samadhi day fell on 18 May. A devotee, P. Naveen Kumar, sought official permission to conduct Annadhanam and Angapradakshinam; when his representation drew no response, he moved the Madurai Bench by writ. A single judge allowed the practice and, in doing so, treated the prior division bench judgment as a nullity. The State — the District Collector and others — appealed. A division bench of Justice R. Suresh Kumar and Justice G. Arul Murugan heard the writ appeals and, on 13 March 2025, partly allowed them, restored the primacy of the earlier division bench judgment, and temporarily barred the practice pending the Supreme Court's decision on the Karnataka matter.

The questions

Two questions arose, one procedural and one substantive. The procedural question was whether a single judge could treat a binding division bench judgment of the same High Court as a nullity and decide contrary to it. The substantive question was whether Angapradakshinam is a protected religious practice under Article 25, and if so, whether it nonetheless falls foul of the public-order, health and morality limits that Article 25 carries.

The two questions were connected in the way the litigation unfolded: it was precisely by purporting to set aside the division bench's view that the single judge had been able to permit the ritual, so the appellate court had to address the discipline point before it could reach the merits.

The ordering of the two questions is itself instructive. Had the single judge respected the binding division bench decision, the permission could not have issued at all; it was only by treating that decision as a nullity that the path to permitting the ritual opened. The appellate court therefore had to restore the precedential position first, and only then consider what, if anything, remained to be decided on the merits. That sequence — discipline before substance — shaped the eventual disposal, because once the division bench judgment was reinstated as binding, the room for a fresh merits conclusion narrowed considerably.

What the Court held

On the procedural question, the division bench held that the single judge had exceeded jurisdiction. The rule of intra-court precedent is settled and the bench restated it crisply: a single judge is ordinarily bound to accept as correct the judgments of division benches, and a division bench judgment that has attained finality as the decision of a higher forum of the same High Court cannot be nullified by a single bench.

The single judge's order, treating the earlier division bench judgment as a nullity and permitting the ritual contrary to it, could not stand. The discipline of precedent within a High Court does not permit a co-ordinate judge of lower numerical strength to override a division bench; the proper course, faced with a binding division bench decision thought to be wrong, is reference to a larger bench, not unilateral nullification.

On the merits, the Court was careful and staged. It accepted that the practice might clear the public-order and health filters of Article 25.

But the Court held that whether the practice offends public morality or constitutional morality is a different question — and one it would not decide. That question, the bench reasoned, was best left to the Supreme Court, which is seized of the cognate Karnataka ritual raising the same constitutional-morality concerns. Rather than pre-empt the apex court, the division bench temporarily prohibited Angapradakshinam pending that decision, holding the field in a constitutionally cautious posture.

It is worth noting precisely where one striking observation in this litigation belongs. At the earlier single-bench stage — in the order the division bench was reviewing — it had been reasoned that if the right to privacy under Article 21, as recognised in Puttaswamy, includes a person's sexual orientation, it should likewise include their spiritual orientation. That equation of spiritual with sexual orientation under the privacy guarantee was the single judge's framing. It is not part of the division bench's holding under digest here, and should not be attributed to the 2025:MHC:675 decision; it is recorded because it surfaces in the reportage and is a striking, if contested, extension of the privacy doctrine.

The doctrinal architecture

The judgment does two distinct kinds of work, and its value lies in keeping them separate.

The first is a clean restatement of precedent hierarchy within a High Court. A single judge is bound by, and cannot declare a nullity, a co-ordinate division bench judgment. The rule is elementary but frequently strained in practice, and the case supplies a crisp authority for any situation in which a single judge has purported to overrule or sidestep a division bench. The remedy for a binding decision thought to be wrong is reference upward, not disregard.

The second is a staged Article 25 analysis. The bench's reasoning illustrates that a religious practice may clear some of the Article 25 limits — public order, health — and yet remain vulnerable to another: the morality and constitutional-morality filter. The Court declined to resolve that filter, demonstrating a posture of comity with the Supreme Court. Where a cognate question is sub judice before the apex court, a High Court may decline to pronounce and instead hold a temporary status quo pending apex guidance. This is restraint as doctrine: the division bench neither validated nor finally condemned the ritual, but suspended it until the governing law is settled.

What this changes for practice

For litigators, the ruling is doubly useful. As a precedent-discipline authority, it is citable in any matter where a single judge has purported to override a division bench — a recurring procedural pathology. As an Article 25 marker, it shows how a court can responsibly defer the morality question to the Supreme Court without either permitting or finally prohibiting a contested ritual, taking the middle path of a temporary bar.

Temple administrations and devotees should read the outcome narrowly: the practice is barred for now, but the bar is expressly provisional, tethered to the apex court's eventual decision on the Karnataka ritual. The constitutional status of Angapradakshinam is therefore unsettled rather than foreclosed.

The judgment also models a particular kind of judicial humility about the limits of the High Court's role. Faced with a question of public and constitutional morality that is genuinely contested and already before the apex court, the Bench declined to supply its own answer, recognising that a High Court pronouncement on the morality of the ritual could be unsettled within months by the Supreme Court's decision and would, in the interval, govern a sensitive matter of religious observance on a footing the apex court might reject. The temporary bar is the conservative course: it neither blesses a practice that may be held unconstitutional nor permits one whose constitutional status is about to be authoritatively determined elsewhere.

Trajectory

The ultimate fate of the ruling is tied to the Supreme Court's decision on the Karnataka made-snana-type practice; once that lands, the Madras position will be revisited. Expect citation in temple-administration and religious-practice litigation across Madras, Karnataka and Kerala, and in academic commentary on the essential-religious-practices and constitutional-morality tests. The single-bench "spiritual orientation as privacy" framing — properly attributed to the earlier order, not this division bench — may be picked up by privacy and religious-freedom scholars, but it carries no precedential weight from this judgment. Watch the Supreme Court's Karnataka matter for the doctrine that will ultimately govern.

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Sources

1. Verdictum — "Division Bench's Judgment Can't Be Nullified By Single Bench: Madras High Court Temporarily Bans Practice Of 'Angapradakshinam' Till Apex Court Decides" (case page, 2025:MHC:675; Suresh Kumar & Arul Murugan JJ.; 13 March 2025).
2. LiveLaw — "Madras High Court Weekly Round-Up: March 10 to March 16, 2025" (bench, date and outcome corroboration).
3. BarandBench — "Right to privacy also includes person's spiritual orientation: Madras High Court" (context for the earlier single-bench reasoning addressed by the division bench).