New Delhi: When Dina Budhraja’s grandmother died in September 2024, she, without permission to pray inside the agiary (fire temple), had no option but to conduct the funeral ceremony at her mother’s house.
Despite being born to Parsi Zoroastrian parents and practising the faith her entire life, she wasn’t allowed to go inside the agiary because she “ceased to be a Parsi” the moment she married a Hindu man under Special Marriage Act.
Earlier, responding to her formal, written representation to offer prayers at the agiary on the event of her ailing grandmother’s demise, the Nagpur Parsi Panchayat managing committee had said that a Parsi woman married to a non-Parsi “is not permitted to enter the agiary and would be required to sit outside on the veranda”. Her grandmother, Aban Rustom Shapurji (95), had suffered a stroke.
Now, Budhraja has moved the Supreme Court of India under Article 32, seeking to strike down rules she describes as “inhuman, insensitive, and archaic”.
An SC bench, including Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, along with Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul M. Pancholi, issued a notice on the petition, inviting responses from the Nagpur Parsi Panchayat, the Ministry of Minority Affairs, the Centre, the Maharashtra government, and the Charity Commissioner of Maharashtra.
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‘Soul-shattering’ experience, ‘unconstitutional’ rule
The petition filed by Advocate-on-Record Rohit Anil Rathi and represented by advocates Shyam Divan and Ankur Singhal invoked the Supreme Court’s extraordinary jurisdiction. It argued the Nagpur Parsi Panchayat—a charitable trust that discharges “public functions”—was enforcing rules that resulted in “continuous violation of Budhraja’s fundamental rights”.
The petition contended that the Panchayat’s actions violated the right to equality under Article 14, the right to life and dignity under Article 21, and the right to freely profess and practise one’s religion under Article 25 of the Indian Constitution.
The petitioner, Dina Budhraja, sought a declaration from the SC that Rule 5(2)—“any Parsi/Irani Zoroastrian woman who marries a non-Parsi man and bears children from such an alliance, then such a woman and her children will not be accepted as Parsi/Irani Zarthostis”—is unconstitutional.
The petitioner argued that the trust had no authority to excommunicate her, stating that the Nagpur Parsi Panchayat’s “powers end with granting or refusing charities…It therefore does not have any right whatsoever to prevent the petitioner from professing her religion”.
She specifically moved the court, following the “soul-shattering” experience of being denied entry to the agiary for her grandmother’s last rites, fearing she would be similarly barred from her own mother’s future funeral prayers.
Citing the 1909 Bombay High Court order in Sir Dinshaw Maneckji Petit vs Sir Jamsetji Jijibhai, the petitioner argued the expression “Parsi” denoted ethnicity and lineage, not religious profession. Further, a person born to Parsi parents was Parsi by birth, and such ethnic identity could not be extinguished by marriage.
Different rules are followed in Kolkata & Delhi
The heart of Budhraja’s case in the Supreme Court is the arbitrariness and illegality of Rule 5(2) of the Constitution of the Nagpur Parsi Panchayat.
Her petition also highlighted the inconsistencies in how the faith was shaped and how the issue of marriage outside the faith was dealt with across the country. Other Parsi Panchayats that did not subscribe to the Nagpur practice—in Kolkata and Delhi—have permitted the entry of Parsi Zoroastrian women who married non-Parsis into the agiary under the Special Marriage Act.
Delhi Parsi Anjuman rules state, “The Parsi Zoroastrians, married to non-Parsi Zoroastrians, who continue to practise the Zoroastrian religion, have the right to use all facilities provided by the Delhi Parsi Anjuman”.
The petition argues that since the practice of excommunication was neither uniform nor essential to the Zoroastrian faith, the Nagpur Panchayat’s rigid stance was “incongruous and illogical”.
‘Women treated as secondary citizens’
A blatant gender double standard within the Nagpur rules, the petition argued, was that while Rule 5(2) stripped a woman of her identity upon marriage to an outsider, Rule 5(3) ensured that a Parsi man who married a non-Parsi woman faced no such excommunication.
He retained his identity and his access to the Agiary, and his children were welcomed into the fold.
Describing this as a “clear gender bias” where women were treated as “secondary citizens” or “chattel belonging to her father or her husband”. “The rule entrenches patriarchal notions whereby a woman’s identity is treated as derivative of her husband’s… whereas a Parsi man who marries a non-Parsi woman retains his identity,” the petition argued.
Further, pointing out the biological irony, the petitioner said that grandchildren of Parsi men, who might be only “25% genetically Parsi”, were granted full religious access, while she, a “100% biologically Parsi” daughter, was treated as an “untouchable”.
Avoiding the ‘Sabarimala tagging’
The famous Goolrook M. Gupta vs Burjor Pardiwala matter—premised around similar constitutional questions—was tagged with the Sabarimala review petitions and is to be heard by the top court’s nine-judge bench, starting 7 April.
A five-judge Supreme Court Constitution Bench passed an interim order in December 2017, allowing Goolrokh Gupta to enter Parsi fire temples and the Tower of Silence to attend her parents’ last rites, while leaving the larger legal question—whether a Parsi woman’s right to marry outside and retain her religious status could be denied—for a larger bench.
However, Budhraja emphasised that she was seeking a declaration to “avoid multiplicity of proceedings and ensure uniformity in the application of constitutional principles”.
Her legal move under Article 32 for an immediate declaration that ‘Rule 5(2) is unconstitutional’ seeks to resolve her personal grievance regarding access to family rites, rather than having her specific religious identity held in a years-long legal limbo waiting for a general ruling on “essential religious practices”.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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