On 12 May 2026, a two-judge bench expunged findings of cruelty and desertion against a dentist wife who had relocated from Kargil to Ahmedabad for tertiary medical care and to pursue her practice, holding that 'marriage does not eclipse her individuality' and retaining the divorce decree on the ground of irretrievable breakdown under Article 142.
On 17 February 2020, a two-judge Bench of Justices D.Y. Chandrachud and Ajay Rastogi held that the Ministry of Defence policy denying Short Service Commission women officers Permanent Commission in non-combat arms of the Indian Army — Army Service Corps, Ordnance Corps, EME, Signals, Intelligence Corps, AEC, JAG and the other streams in which women had been inducted as SSC officers — violates Articles 14, 15 and 16. The Court rejected the Centre's submissions about 'physiological limitations', 'domestic obligations' and unit cohesion as constitutionally impermissible gender stereotypes, set aside the 'staff appointments only' restriction in the 25 February 2019 policy letter, and directed that all serving SSC women officers be considered for Permanent Commission on terms equivalent to male officers with consequential entitlements. *Babita Puniya* installed the anti-stereotype framework that *Annie Nagaraja* (Navy) and *Lt Col Nitisha* (indirect discrimination) elaborated, and that *Lt Col Pooja Pal* (2026) operationalised through Article 142 structural compensatory relief.
On 24 March 2026 a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court — Surya Kant CJ, Ujjal Bhuyan and N. Kotiswar Singh JJ — held that the denial of Permanent Commission to women Short Service Commission Officers across the Army, Navy and Air Force was the consequence of a structurally discriminatory evaluation framework, not of individual merit assessments. Invoking Article 142, the Court created a legal fiction of deemed completion of 20 years' qualifying service for SSCWOs released during the long litigation, preserved already-granted Permanent Commissions, and directed that serving SSCWOs meeting the 60% Selection Board cut-off be granted Permanent Commission subject to medical and disciplinary clearance. A digest of the holding, the structural-discrimination reasoning, and the Article 142 remedial architecture that closes the Babita Puniya / Annie Nagaraja / Nitisha line.
On 10 July 2024, a two-judge bench of Justices B.V. Nagarathna and Augustine George Masih held that a divorced Muslim woman is entitled to claim maintenance under Section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 (now Section 144 of the BNSS, 2023) against her husband, and that the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986 operates in addition to — not in derogation of — that secular maintenance right. The judgment is the most consequential restoration of the Shah Bano line in the post-1986 period.
On 22 August 2017, a Constitution Bench of five judges drawn from five faiths held by 3:2 that talaq-e-biddat — the practice of instant, irrevocable triple talaq — was unconstitutional. Justice Nariman and Justice Lalit struck it down as manifestly arbitrary under Article 14. Justice Kurian Joseph struck it down on Islamic theological grounds. Chief Justice Khehar and Justice Nazeer would have left the practice to legislative reform. A digest of the bench, the three operative positions, the doctrine on manifest arbitrariness, and the subsequent Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act, 2019.
On 27 September 2018 — three weeks after Navtej Singh Johar — a five-judge Constitution Bench unanimously struck down Section 497 IPC, the colonial-era adultery provision that had treated the wife as the husband's property and the consenting adulterer as a thief of marital chastity. Four concurring opinions deployed the dignity and equality framework to dismantle a provision that had survived more than a century and a half of constitutional silence. A digest of the holding, the doctrinal architecture, and the relationship with the BNS framework.