Supreme Court to hear Sabarimala review pleas on February 16

The Supreme Court is scheduled on February 16 to hear a series of review and writ petitions concerning a September 2018 judgment allowing women of menstruating age entry into the Sabarimala temple in Kerala.

A three-judge Bench headed by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant has scheduled the petitions for hearing on Monday (February 16, 2026).

In November 2019, a majority judgment by a five-judge Constitution Bench led by the 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 questions for the seven-judge Bench to answer, including whether such practices considered essential should be given Constitutional protection, and the extent to which the judiciary could intervene in an essential religious practice.

After Chief Justice Gogoi’s retirement, his successor, Chief Justice Sharad Bobde, had constituted a nine-judge Bench in January 2020 to hear the case. Justice Kant was a member of that Bench.

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”.