To read what the Union and Review Petitioners argued on the interplay of Articles 25 and 26, read our detailed report here.
“MY LORD, if these judgments – Navtej Singh Johar, Joseph Shine – were to be read by Dr. Ambedkar, or K.M. Munshi or Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar, I do not know whether they would be surprised, shocked, or they would say that is what they wanted,” Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, for the Union government, argued last Wednesday, “I believe they did not want this to happen.”
Mehta was not arguing a review of the Navtej Johar (that decriminalised same sex relationships in 2018), or Joseph Shine (that decriminalised adultery) decisions, but answering a two-pronged bone of contention in the Sabarimala reference – what is ‘morality’ under Articles 25 and 26, and whether constitutional morality be the basis for judicial review? This question is so relevant that it ties the current review hearings before this nine-judge Bench to a majority of the landmark rulings of the last decade which have been rooted in constitutional morality with a domino effect.
Last week, the Solicitor General and the Review Petitioners noted that the ‘morality’ restriction under Article 25 referred to ‘public morality’, that ‘constitutional morality’, as the framers meant it, was simply about constitutional conventions to be followed by government functionaries, and that a series of judgments had got it all wrong.
