“On the Reserved Verdict in the Sabarimala Review Case: An Open Letter”, My Ind Maker, June 11, 2026
“I. The Occasion
On the 20th of January 2020, shortly after the Sabarimala matter was referred for reconsideration to a larger Bench of this Court, I had the occasion to address an open letter to the then Chief Justice of India, Justice Sharad Arvind Bobde.
In that letter, I placed two witnesses from the world’s own constitutional memory — the Magna Carta of 1215, whose very first clause secured that “the Church of England shall be free, and shall have all her whole Rights and Liberties inviolable” (one of only four of its sixty-three clauses still alive in English law to this day); and the address of Pope Paul VI to the United Nations on the 4th of October 1965, in which he asserted the necessity of “temporal sovereignty — the minimum needed in order to be free to exercise his spiritual mission.”
While the one who commanded absolute spiritual sovereignty in his sphere demanded the need for temporal sovereignty to sustain his spiritual mission. The Indian tradition, by contrast, neither fused the two powers into a single authority nor laid claim to absolute dominance in any one domain and had an architecture of non-interference between the two domains. Yet, despite this being the foundational Indian inheritance, the spiritual mission of Indian religions has remained subject to frequent State interference even after Independence by the democratic government……..”
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