The Supreme Court will decide an interesting question of law whether a woman will lose her religious identity upon marrying a man of another religion.
Treating this question to be one that involves gender justice and the freedom of an individual to practice one’s own religion, a three-judge Bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra, constituted a five-judge Bench headed by him to hear the issue involving constitutional questions of law.
The case before the Bench arose in an appeal filed by a Parsi woman, Goolrokh M Gupta, who despite being married to a Hindu under the Special Marriages Act, continued to practice her Zoroastrianism religion but was denied entry into the Parsi worship places to perform her father’s last rites. She approached the Gujarat High Court which gave a decision in 2010 that by virtue of her marriage, the petitioner had acquired the religion of her husband. Thus, the HC held she ceased to be a Parsi by faith.
Challenging this decision, the Parsi wife, represented by senior advocate Indira
Jaising, submitted before the apex court that this decision had grave consequences on the woman’s rights vis-Ã -vis Parsi men, as this disqualification applied only to women in the community.
Further, she argued that in the Indian Constitution, Article 25 (right to practice religion) defines religion as a matter of what you actually practice and not as a matter of what you acquire with marriage.
The Bench told Jaising, “We are referring it to five-judge constitution bench” after it understood the gravity of the issue at hand. The occasion may require the court to delve into the personal laws of the Parsis in order to understand whether there is a gender bias behind the practice of keeping out Parsi men who are similarly situated.
The woman, in her appeal filed in 2012 stated that she sought the right to visit the ‘Tower of Silence’ to perform the last rites on the event of her father’s death. Though she continued to follow her Parsi faith, she lost her right to offer prayers at Agiari, a Parsi temple having the ‘holy fire’ and the ‘Tower of Silence’.