The Supreme Court 9 Judge Bench today heard another submission by counsel in an intervention application concerning the rights of Parsi women who marry outside the faith. He argued that marriage under the Special Marriage Act, 1954, cannot strip a woman of her Parsi identity or religious rights.

He represented the case of Goolrokh Gupta, a Parsi Zoroastrian woman who married a Hindu man under the Special Marriage Act and was denied all the Parsi rights, including the right to attend her parents’ funeral ceremonies at a Parsi fire temple and Dungarwadi.

Arguing against the Gujarat High Court ruling, he submitted that ethnicity is “an accident of birth” and cannot be taken away merely because a woman marries outside the community. He contended that while Zoroastrianism is a religion, “Parsi” refers to descendants of Persian refugees who fled religious persecution and settled in Gujarat between the 8th and 10th centuries.

He further argued that the Special Marriage Act was enacted precisely to preserve the religion and identity of persons entering interfaith marriages, and therefore, common law notions that a woman adopts her husband’s religion after marriage cannot survive after the enactment of the statute.

On the constitutional issue, he urged the Bench to harmoniously interpret Articles 25 and 26, arguing that denominational rights of religious institutions cannot “trample upon” the individual freedoms guaranteed under Article 25.

“Your Lordships posed a question yesterday regarding the balancing. I would respectfully submit that the balancing would effectively come when you say that the rights which are preserved under Article 26 can undoubtedly be exercised so long as they don’t trample over the rights which are guaranteed under Article 25. That would be a harmonious reading of the two. That would preserve the rights of the religious denomination under Article 26 and preserve the rights of the individual under Article 25…the exercise of rights by the religious denomination under 26 ought not to trample upon the exercise of rights by the individual under 25. And that would really be the balance.”