Essential Religious Practices

In one line

A court will protect a religious practice only if that practice is essential to the religion, and it is the court, not the believer, that decides whether it is.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: articles 25 and 26 protect not merely religious opinion but acts done in pursuance of belief, and not everything a claimant calls religious is protected. In Shirur Mutt the Supreme Court held that "what constitutes the essential part of a religion is primarily to be ascertained with reference to the doctrines of that religion itself". In Durgah Committee it added that protection "must be confined to such religious practices as are an essential and an integral part of it and no other". That is the essential religious practices doctrine, and it works as a threshold: a practice that fails it is not protected at all, so no question of reasonable restriction arises.

Why the law has this at all

Article 25(2) forces the question on the courts. Clause (a) preserves the State's power to regulate any "secular activity which may be associated with religious practice", clause (b) its power to legislate for social welfare and reform. Both assume a line between what is religion and what is merely attached to it, and only a court can draw it.

The second reason is practical. Without a threshold the guarantee becomes a veto: any law could be met by asserting that the conduct it forbids is somebody's religion. Durgah Committee names the worry exactly, that secular practices "are apt to be clothed with a religious form".

The provision

Article 25(1) is set out in [Articles 25 and 26]. Two clauses do the work here.

Article 25(2) preserves any existing law and any law the State makes "(a) regulating or restricting any economic, financial, political or other secular activity which may be associated with religious practice; (b) providing for social welfare and reform or the throwing open of Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all classes and sections of Hindus."

Article 26 gives every religious denomination the right "(b) to manage its own affairs in matters of religion" and "(d) to administer such property in accordance with law."

Read (b) against (d). Managing its own affairs in matters of religion carries no qualification; administering property is expressly "in accordance with law". A legislature may regulate a temple's property and may not regulate its worship, and every case below turns on which side of that line the impugned provision falls.

Where the doctrine begins

Facts. The Commissioner, Hindu Religious Endowments, Madras v. Sri Lakshmindra Thirtha Swamiar of Sri Shirur Mutt, 1954 AIR 282, 1954 SCR 1005, decided 16 April 1954. The Madras Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Act 1951 gave the Commissioner extensive control over the Shirur Mutt, a Hindu monastic institution, including power to settle a scheme, to require budgets, and by section 76(1) to levy an annual contribution. Its head challenged those provisions under articles 19(1)(f), 25 and 26.