“A COMPLETE THIRD PARTY, a non-believer, cannot walk into a place of worship and demand that matters of faith must yield to individual claims,” submitted Advocate Nizam Pasha, capturing a thread that ran through the entirety of Tuesday’s proceedings before the Supreme Court.
Yesterday, the Sabarimala Reference saw the Review Petitioners conclude their arguments before a nine-judge Constitution Bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant. A string of advocates, which included Senior Advocates Sridhar Potaraju and Madhavi Divan, and advocates Nizam Pasha, Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay, and Mathews Nedumpara, alongside several intervenors, addressed the Bench on questions of denominational rights, the reach of social reform under Article 25(2)(b), and the constitutional limits of judicial scrutiny over religious belief.
‘A place of worship is nothing but a belief system’: Advocate Nizam Pasha
Pasha opened by drawing attention to a law student’s petition in the Delhi High Court seeking entry for women to the inner sanctum of the Hazrat Nizamuddin Dargah, which he described as a stark illustration of how the 2018 Sabarimala judgment had been misused. His central submission was that a place of worship embodies a belief system, and that its contours cannot be redrawn by those who do not subscribe to that faith.
Pasha, while relying on Sri Venkataramana Devaru v. State of Mysore (1957), argued that Sufi dargahs of the Chishtiya order qualify as religious denominations entitled to protection under Article 26. He drew a clear distinction between Articles 25 and 26, the former protecting individual conscience, the latter securing the collective right of a religious community to manage its own affairs. Entry rights under Article 25(2)(b), he maintained, were intended to address social reform, not to function as a general override of denominational autonomy.
