Indian Young Lawyers Association v. State of Kerala: The Sabarimala Temple Entry Judgment

The Supreme Court's 4:1 Constitution Bench in Sabarimala held the exclusion of menstruating-age women from the temple unconstitutional and struck Rule 3(b).

Valkya Editorial· Legal Intelligence·15 June 2026·8 min read

Court: Supreme Court of India
Citation: (2019) 11 SCC 1
Bench: Dipak Misra, CJI, Rohinton Fali Nariman, J., A.M. Khanwilkar, J., D.Y. Chandrachud, J., Indu Malhotra, J.
Decided: 28 September 2018

Provisions discussed

Constitution of India art.25art.26art.17art.14Kerala Hindu Places of Public Worship (Authorisation of Entry) Rules 1965 r.3(b)

The Sabarimala judgment sits at one of the most contested intersections in Indian constitutional law: the point at which the individual's guarantee of equal religious freedom meets a community's claim to manage its own affairs. The Supreme Court's answer, delivered on 28 September 2018, was that a centuries-old practice of exclusion could not survive scrutiny under Articles 14 and 25 merely because it was draped in the language of faith. The decision was as celebrated as it was bitterly resisted, and the litigation it set in motion has not ended.

What makes the case worth studying carefully is less the headline result than the architecture of the reasoning. The majority did not treat the question as a simple clash between equality and religion to be settled by preferring one over the other. It worked instead through a sequence of doctrinal gates — the reach of Article 25(1), the existence of a denomination under Article 26, the boundary of the essential-practices test, and the vires of the enabling rule — each of which had to be crossed before the exclusion could fall. The dissent disputed not the value of equality but who should be deciding these questions, and on what terms a court may enter the sanctum of religious belief at all. Reading the two sides together is the most instructive way to understand both the holding and the unsettled doctrine it exposed.

The facts in brief

The petitioner, the Indian Young Lawyers Association, moved the Supreme Court by way of a public interest litigation — Writ Petition (C) No. 373 of 2006 — challenging the age-based exclusion of women at the Sabarimala temple in Kerala. Sabarimala is dedicated to Lord Ayyappa, and by long-standing custom women between the ages of ten and fifty — that is, women of menstruating age — were not permitted to enter. The practice was given a legal foothold by Rule 3(b) of the Kerala Hindu Places of Public Worship (Authorisation of Entry) Rules, 1965, which was relied upon to authorise the exclusion.

The petitioners contended that this exclusion violated several guarantees of Part III of the Constitution: the right to equality under Article 14, the bar on discrimination under Article 15, the abolition of untouchability under Article 17, the freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion under Article 25, and the freedom to manage religious affairs under Article 26.

The questions

The Bench had to resolve a cluster of intertwined questions. First, whether the exclusion of women of a particular age group offended the right of women to worship and the freedom of religion under Article 25(1), a right the Constitution extends equally to all persons. Second, whether the worshippers of Lord Ayyappa at Sabarimala formed a separate religious "denomination" under Article 26 — for if they did, they could assert a denominational right to manage their own affairs in matters of religion. Third, whether the exclusion qualified as an "essential religious practice" of that faith, a category the Court has long treated as protected. And fourth, whether Rule 3(b) of the 1965 Rules, in authorising the exclusion, was valid.

What the Court held

The Court ruled 4:1 against the exclusion. The Chief Justice, Dipak Misra, wrote for himself and Khanwilkar, J., and was joined by separate concurring opinions from Nariman, J. and Chandrachud, J. Indu Malhotra, J. dissented.

The majority's reasoning moved across four propositions.

On Article 25(1), the Court held that the freedom of religion — the freedom of conscience and the right to profess, practise and propagate religion — is guaranteed equally to all persons, and that the exclusion of women of menstruating age denied them the very right to worship that the Constitution secures. A practice that shut women out of the temple on the basis of a physiological characteristic could not be reconciled with that equal guarantee.

On Article 26, the Court found that the devotees of Lord Ayyappa at Sabarimala did not constitute a separate religious "denomination." Because there was no distinct denomination, there was no denominational right under Article 26 to manage religious affairs that could be invoked to justify keeping women out.

On the essential-practices question, the Court held that the exclusion was not an "essential religious practice" protected by the Constitution. The practice therefore could not claim the immunity that attaches to the core, indispensable tenets of a faith. This conclusion did the decisive work in the majority's structure: had the exclusion qualified as essential, the constitutional protection of religion would have shielded it from the equality challenge; once it was found inessential, there was nothing to set against the equal right of women to worship.

Finally, the Court turned to Rule 3(b) of the Kerala Hindu Places of Public Worship (Authorisation of Entry) Rules, 1965. Insofar as that rule authorised the exclusion, it was struck down both as ultra vires the parent Act and as unconstitutional.

Chandrachud, J. added a distinct and far-reaching dimension to the majority's reasoning. He read Article 17 — the constitutional abolition of untouchability — to forbid exclusion based on notions of "purity and pollution." On this view, an exclusion premised on the idea that menstruating women are a source of impurity was not merely unequal treatment; it engaged the constitutional guarantee against untouchability itself.

The dissent

Justice Indu Malhotra, the lone woman on the Bench, dissented. Her opinion rested on several connected propositions. She held that issues of deep religious sentiment are not ordinarily for the courts to decide. She took the view that the petitioners — who had come to the Court through a third-party public interest litigation — lacked standing in a matter concerning essential religious practice. She held that the temple's devotees could form a religious denomination. And she reasoned that courts should intervene in religious practice only where it is pernicious, oppressive, or a social evil such as Sati.

The dissent thus pressed a competing vision of the judicial role: one in which the proper deference owed to religious communities, and caution about who may invoke the Court's writ jurisdiction over matters of faith, weigh against intervention save in the gravest cases. Three threads run through it. The first is institutional: questions of deep religious sentiment are, on this view, not ordinarily justiciable, and a court should be slow to substitute its own assessment of a practice for the community's. The second is procedural: a third-party public interest litigation is an uneasy vehicle for adjudicating whether a practice is essential to a faith, because the petitioners stood outside the community whose belief was in issue. The third is substantive: the boundary the dissent would draw permits judicial intervention only where a practice is pernicious, oppressive, or a social evil — the example given being Sati — and not merely because it is unequal in operation. Whatever one makes of the result, the dissent crystallised the hardest question the majority had to answer: by what standard, and at whose instance, may a constitutional court decide what a religion requires of its adherents.

Why it matters

Sabarimala is a landmark on the intersection of gender equality and religious freedom, and it remains a heavily cited constitutional precedent. But its doctrinal afterlife has proved as significant as the judgment itself. A battery of review and reference petitions followed the verdict, and they led a larger nine-judge Bench — in Kantaru Rajeevaru — to frame broader questions on the scope of the essential religious practices doctrine and the limits of judicial review of religion.

Those questions remain pending. The result is an unusual posture: the Sabarimala judgment stands as a live and frequently invoked precedent on equal worship and the limits of denominational claims, even as the larger constitutional questions it provoked — about how far courts may probe whether a practice is "essential" to a faith, and where the boundary of judicial review of religion lies — await answer from a still larger Bench. For practitioners, the case is therefore best read not as a closed chapter but as the opening of a constitutional inquiry whose final shape is yet to be settled.