On Monday, a nine-judge Constitution bench of the Supreme Court began hearing a batch of pleas on the issue of allowing women of all ages to enter Kerala's Sabarimala temple, along with other contentious issues of alleged discrimination against Muslim and Parsi women.
SC gives three weeks to all the lawyers for finalisation of all issues relating to Sabarimala and the rest of the matters. Conference of lawyers to be held on January 17 for the same.
During the hearing, advocate Indira Jaising said "the rightness or wrongness if the Sabarimala is a precondition to answer these questions. No competent court has declared the Sabarimala judgment bad in law."
A nine-judge bench headed by Chief Justice S A Bobde said that it was not considering review pleas in the Sabarimala case. "We are not hearing review pleas of Sabarimala case. We are considering issues referred to by a 5-judge bench earlier," the bench said. There are more than 50 review petitions, which had challenged the judgement of the Supreme Court allowing the entry of women of all ages in the Sabarimala temple in Kerala. The petitions are pending before the Supreme Court for final disposal.
The apex court had on November 14 asked a larger bench to re-examine various religious issues, including the entry of women into the Sabarimala Temple and mosques and the practice of female genital mutilation in the Dawoodi Bohra community.
While the five-judge bench unanimously agreed to refer religious issues to a larger bench, it gave a 3:2 split decision on petitions seeking a review of the apex court's September 2018 decision allowing women of all ages to enter the Sabarimala shrine in Kerala.
