Losing Your Religion

There are many practices in various religions that are unequal and unfair to the women professing those religions. However, when the state is misogynist to the extent of stripping women of the religion they choose to profess for having married a person belonging to a different religion, it is an affront to the Constitution, which has enjoined equal treatment and autonomy of women.

We see this in the case of Goolrukh Gupta, a woman professing the Parsi Zoroastrian faith and married to a non-Parsi Zoroastrian. Her appeal to the High Court of Gujarat to be able to continue to practise and profess Parsi Zoroastrianism—which a religious trust in Valsad was obstructing—was dismissed in 2012. The court ruled that having married “a non-Parsi under the Special Marriage Act, 1954, [she] would be deemed and presumed to have acquired the religious status of the husband.” In other words, the court clamped down on her fundamental right to freedom of religion as is guaranteed in the Constitution.