Sabarimala women entry: Supreme Court’s 9-judge Constitution Bench to begin review hearing from April 7

The Supreme Court on Monday (February 16, 2026) scheduled a series of review and writ petitions concerning a September 2018 judgment, which allowed women of menstruating age to enter into the Sabarimala temple in Kerala, for hearing before a nine-judge Constitution Bench from April 7, 2026.

A Bench headed by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant said the maintainability of the review petitions had already been decided by an earlier nine-judge Bench constituted in 2019 by then Chief Justice of India Sharad A. Bobde. The hearings before the Bench had to be aborted abruptly due to the onset of the COVID pandemic.

The Sabarimala case has come up for the first time after a gap of nearly five years and post the pandemic. Chief Justice Kant is the only remaining serving judge of that original nine-judge Bench.

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The Supreme Court gave a brief timeline for the hearing of the case in April 2026. The nine-judge Bench would hear the review petitioners challenging the 2018 judgment from April 7 to April 9. Those opposing them would be heard from April 14-16. The rejoinder submissions would be heard on April 21, followed by the concluding submissions from the amicus curiae on April 22. Parties have to adhere to the timeline, the court stressed.

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In November 2019, a majority judgment by a five-judge Constitution Bench led by then Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi had referred the Sabarimala review and writ petitions to a seven-judge Bench.

Over 60 review and writ petitions had challenged the Sabarimala judgment of 2018. The 2019 judgment had not expressly stayed the September 2018 verdict.

The 2019 majority judgment had also clubbed similar petitions concerning essentiality of religious practices pending in the Supreme Court, including the right of Muslim women to enter mosques, Parsi women who have married out of their faith to enter their religious place of worship and the issue of female genital mutilation practised by the Dawoodi Bohra community, with the Sabarimala case.

The judgment in 2019 had framed legal questions in the case, including whether practices considered essential should be given constitutional protection and the extent to which the judiciary could intervene in an essential religious practice.

The nine-judge Bench was constituted as it had to necessarily delve into a 1954 judgment by a seven-judge Bench in the Shirur Mutt case which had for the first time gone into what constituted “essential religious practices”. In the 1954 judgment, the apex court had held that “what constitutes the essential part of a religion is primarily to be ascertained with reference to the doctrines of that religion itself”.