A fresh Supreme Court petition has reopened one of the most difficult questions in Indian law: what happens when a criminal protection applies to some citizens and not others, because of the religion they were born into.
On 31 July, the Supreme Court issued notice to the Union government on a petition seeking to declare the practice of polygamy among Muslims unconstitutional. The plea, filed by activists Zakia Soman and Noorjehan Safia Niaz through advocates Shriya Maini and Rajive Maini, was heard by a Bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant, and has been tagged with other pending matters raising related questions.
What the Petition Argues
At the centre of the case is Section 82 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, which criminalises bigamy for Indian citizens generally. Section 2 of the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937 recognises and applies Muslim personal law, under which polygamy is permitted in specific circumstances. The petitioners argue that this creates a legal asymmetry: bigamy is a criminal offence for most citizens, but not, in the same way, for Muslim men, and that this asymmetry leaves Muslim women without a protection available to women of other faiths.
The plea frames this as a violation of Articles 14 and 15, equality before the law and non-discrimination, and Article 21, the right to live with dignity, arguing that polygamous marriages expose women and children to psychological, emotional and economic harm that the state has an obligation to prevent regardless of the religious community involved. It also argues that the protection of religious freedom under Article 25 is not absolute and remains subject to constitutional morality, public order and health, and cannot on its own shield a practice the petitioners characterise as discriminatory in effect.
Beyond the constitutional challenge, the petition asks for practical relief: mandatory registration of Muslim marriages and divorces, so that subsequent marriages cannot happen quietly or without documentation; immediate residential rights for a first wife and her children if a husband takes a second marriage; and a fast-track mechanism for maintenance in such situations.
The Other Side of the Argument
Petitions of this kind sit inside a decades-long, unresolved debate about the relationship between religious personal law and uniform criminal or civil protections, one this magazine has touched on before in the context of the broader Uniform Civil Code conversation. Those opposed to this kind of intervention generally argue that personal law is protected by the Constitution's guarantee of religious freedom, that reform of religious practice is more legitimately pursued through community-led change or legislative consensus than through litigation, and that singling out one community's personal law for judicial scrutiny, rather than addressing gender-unequal practices across all personal law systems simultaneously, risks being seen as selective rather than principled.
The Court has, at this stage, only issued notice. It has not expressed a view on the merits, and the Centre's formal response is still pending. This is the opening move in what is likely to be a long-running and closely watched case, not a decision.
Why This Matters Beyond the Headline
Cases like this one rarely move quickly, and their eventual outcome, whichever direction it goes, will affect far more people than the specific petitioners. What is worth understanding now, before the legal argument intensifies, is the actual mechanism being challenged: not "polygamy" as an abstract social practice, but a specific asymmetry in how one section of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita applies. Readers who want to follow this case usefully, rather than simply react to headlines about it, will benefit from keeping that distinction, between the social practice and the specific statutory gap, clearly in view as the matter proceeds.
Representation in the Room That Decides
July also brought a smaller but symbolically significant development on where women stand inside the institutions that decide questions like these. On 1 August, all seven benches at the Karnataka High Court's Dharwad wing will be presided over exclusively by women judges, with an all-women team of state law officers appearing before them, a first of this scale for any High Court bench in the country. Constitutional courts have had very few fully women-led sittings historically. Whatever one's view on any individual case working through the system, who sits on the bench deciding it, and who argues before that bench, remains part of how confidence in the outcome gets built.