The Fate of ‘Essential Religious Practices’ in India’s Constitutional Courts

It has been nearly seven decades since the Indian Supreme Court laid down the “essential religious practices” test to determine which religious practices are granted constitutional protection against state regulation. This article surveys the forty-three cases in which the essentiality plea has been raised since its formulation in 1954 until August 2022. Although the essentiality plea has a staggeringly high failure rate of 84 percent before India’s constitutional courts, judicial decisions show a shift in legal rationale. The article shows that many of these decisions invariably reflected the socioreligious context of their time. An increase in anti-Muslim religious polarization meant that the fate of the essentiality plea differed depending on the religion of litigants. This judicial treatment of cases stands in stark contrast to the cases decided during the initial decades of the Constitution, when the government was avowedly secular.