Well Argued · Landmark Win

Indian Young Lawyers Association v. State of Kerala (2018): the case, the argument and the legacy

Updated for 2026 · Claw Editorial

In 2018, a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court took up a question that divides belief and constitutional principle: could a famous temple bar women of a certain age from entering, as a matter of religious practice, when the Constitution guarantees equality? By four to one, the Court held that the exclusion could not stand. The lone dissent has echoed ever since. This is the story of that fight, not a full law report.

01What was at stake

At the Sabarimala temple in Kerala, women roughly between the ages of ten and fifty were kept out, a practice linked to the deity's character and long treated as part of the temple's tradition. The Indian Young Lawyers Association challenged that exclusion as a denial of equality and dignity to women.

The case set two constitutional values against each other at close range. On one side stood the freedom of religion and the right of a religious community to manage its own affairs. On the other stood the guarantee of equality and the right of women not to be shut out of a public place of worship because of their sex and age. Deciding the case meant deciding, in a hard instance, where one ends and the other begins.

This is an editorial account written for readers who admire good advocacy. It is not legal advice.

02How it was argued

The challengers argued that the exclusion treated women as unequal on the basis of a physiological fact, and that it could not be saved as an essential religious practice, the narrow category the Constitution protects from interference. A practice, they said, is essential only if the religion itself would lose its identity without it, and an age bar on women did not meet that high bar. They also argued that a public temple open to the general public cannot pick and choose worshippers by sex.

The defenders of the practice argued that the temple's followers form a religious denomination entitled to manage its own affairs, that the practice flowed from the particular nature of the deity, and that courts should be slow to sit in judgment over matters of faith.

The bench divided. The majority tested the practice against equality and dignity. The sole dissent, by Justice Indu Malhotra, warned that courts should not ordinarily decide which religious practices are essential, and that notions of rationality should not be imposed on matters of faith. Both the majority and the dissent have been studied closely ever since.

03What the court held

By a majority of four to one, the Court held that the exclusion of women between the ages of about ten and fifty was unconstitutional. It found that the practice was not an essential part of the religion, that it violated the right of women to equality and to worship, and that devotees of the deity did not form a separate religious denomination entitled to enforce such an exclusion.

Justice Indu Malhotra dissented. She held that the scope for courts to decide what counts as an essential religious practice is limited, and that in a diverse country the courts should be cautious before overriding the beliefs of a faith community. Her opinion did not change the outcome, but it framed the counter-argument with a clarity that has endured.

Faith and equality are both constitutional values. The hardest cases are the ones where they meet head on, and reasonable judges can read the meeting point differently.

The judgment, and the review and related proceedings that followed, show a Court wrestling honestly with the limits of its own role in matters of belief.

04Why it still matters

The Sabarimala case is a central reference in the ongoing debate over the essential religious practices test and the balance between faith and equality. Later references to a larger bench, arising out of this and connected matters, show that the Court itself regards these questions as unsettled and important enough to revisit. Few recent judgments have generated as much legal and public discussion.

What makes the story worth telling is that both sides of it were argued well. The majority gave equality real force in a place many assumed was beyond its reach. The dissent gave voice to a serious worry about courts adjudicating faith. Good advocacy and principled judging produced not a tidy answer but an honest confrontation with a genuinely hard question, which is sometimes the most that law can offer.

That is exactly the kind of advocacy a publication like Well Argued exists to put on record.

05Related landmark wins

The fight over equality and tradition connects this case to others in the Well Argued series:

• Mary Roy's fight for equal inheritance for Syrian Christian women.
• Kesavananda Bharati and the basic structure doctrine.

06About Well Argued

Well Argued is a free, curated publication by Claw that gives an advocate a hard-won court victory an audience, turning a winning judgement into a short, well-told story that Claw shares across its social channels, its website and the AI answer engines. The advocacy that argues a genuinely hard case well, on both sides, is exactly the kind of work that deserves an audience, yet most of it is seen only by the few who happen to be in court that day. Wins and arguments like Sabarimala are what Well Argued exists to tell.

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