Mathews J Nedumpara
98205 35428
14th May 2026.
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A nine-judge Bench of the Supreme Court of India has concluded its hearing of the Sabarimala case. It took 16 days. The Supreme Court sits in Division Benches of 2 or 3 judges—a maximum of 17 Benches. Working 5 hours a day for 200 days in a year, that is a maximum of 17,000 hours.
2.To constitute the nine-judge Bench, five courts had to be closed. That means 16 \times 5 \times 5 = 400 hours.
3.The greatest problem that the Supreme Court is facing is the mismatch between the number of cases instituted and its ability to dispose of the same expeditiously. The Supreme Court is faulted for dismissing almost all SLPs—maybe 95%—at the very admission stage in hearings which, on average, last 93 seconds, via one-line, non-speaking orders. Review Petitions under Article 137 and so-called curative petitions are almost all dismissed in Chambers without any hearing by cyclostyled orders. The pressure of work, I believe, is the sole reason why the court is forced to dismiss SLPs and petitions under Article 32 summarily.
- Litigants and lawyers are aghast, but they accept the denial of justice as a fait accompli. This is because if the Court were to take a more lenient approach, it would lead to the opening of the floodgates. High Courts like Bombay follow suit. Instead of granting relief, the court only seeks reasons to deny justice.
5.Our justice delivery system is in dire straits. The common man is treated as an untouchable. Ordinary litigants and lawyers are unheard and often ill-treated. On the contrary, cases that involve the rich and super-rich are heard out of turn. In High Courts like Bombay, bail applications of undertrials are not heard for months.75 % of all prisoners are undertrials.
6.It is in this extremely distressing situation that the Supreme Court has chosen to hear the issue of “Faith versus Constitutional Morality” for 16 long days.
7.The Sabarimala case is an imaginary issue—a non-issue propped up by Mrs. Indira Jaising and others for fame and name. I belong to Kerala. It is the faith of the devotees of Lord Ayyappa at Sabarimala that the deity is a Naishtika Brahmachari and does not welcome women of menstruating age to visit the temple. There is no other belief. There are no women devotees who want to visit the temple. All my clients who sought the review of the 2018 judgment were women.
The Supreme Court in 2018 declared that the restriction is against constitutional morality. The court did so entirely behind the backs of the devotees. The judgment is, therefore, one rendered void ab initio; it was stillborn and never existed in the eyes of law.
8.Assuming that there are devotees who wanted to visit the temple—which is not the case—then Mrs. Jaising’s clients ought to have approached the civil court and filed a representative suit; the decision in such a suit would then be binding on the devotees. Instead of filing a representative suit in Kerala, Mrs. Jaising’s client filed a PIL on the erroneous premise that the constitutionality of the Rules which had imposed the restriction cannot be questioned in a suit.
9.The PIL was entertained.
Nobody told the Supreme Court that the court has no jurisdiction to render a judgment behind the backs of the millions and millions of devotees of Lord Ayyappa. Soon after the Sabarimala judgment of 2018, the devotees filed through me a third-party Review Petition as also a writ petition for a declaration that the said judgment is void because the court had no jurisdiction to adjudicate the dispute behind the backs of the devotees of Lord Ayyappa.
10.The court, instead of reviewing the judgment, went on to make a reference to a nine-judge Bench.
The scenario today is calamitous. A non-issue—nay, a simple issue which involved no disputed questions of fact or law—was argued for two weeks. It was an exhibition of erudition and lawyerly skills when none was required.
11.I have my sympathies for the Hon’ble Judges. Lawyers on both sides have cited hundreds of judgments where none were required. If the judges were to make reference to the judgments cited—most of which are irrelevant, vague, and voluminous—the judgment would run into hundreds of pages.
12.In the days of Justice Krishna Iyer, complicated sentences and hard words would have impressed the readers. Times have changed. “Brevity is the soul of wit” today, as it was during Shakespeare’s time. What Generation Z expects from the court is a judgment which is precise, written in simple language, where one word is used instead of two—nay, one sentence instead of two.