Liberal Justice over Communtarian Autonomy: Analysing the Sabrimala Judgement

The Sabarimala controversy pits two visions of justice against each other. One of these visions treats the individual as the ultimate bearer of rights. Whereas the other sees faith communities as repositories of meaning, courts should largely leave them undisturbed. India's apex court, in Indian Young Lawyers Association v. State of Kerala, struck down the temple's exclusion of menstruating women. The Supreme Court ruled that an old tradition cannot continue if it goes against constitutional values like equality and human dignity. This paper asks how far that reasoning traces back to John Rawls's liberal theory of justice, and whether the judgment offers any workable path for resolving similar clashes in future, a question existing scholarship, split neatly along liberal and communitarian lines, has largely left unanswered. Using a doctrinal method built around Articles 14, 15, 17, 25, and 26 of the Constitution, the paper reads both the majority opinion and Justice Indu Malhotra's lone dissent through Rawlsian concepts, including the veil of ignorance, equal basic liberties, and self-respect as a primary good. The paper argues that the majority judges chose constitutional rules over tradition, echoing the philosopher John Rawls, who believed that qualities people cannot choose, like their gender, should never be an excuse to treat them unfairly. At the same time, the paper respects Justice Malhotra’s call to protect religious independence. It also considers the critic Michael Sandel’s argument that people cannot simply be separated from their faith, traditions, and communities, because those very ties give their lives meaning.. Instead of picking a clear winner, the paper suggests a flexible, step-by-step approach where judges balance human dignity against religious tradition on a case-by-case basis. In the end, the real takeaway from the Sabarimala case isn't that it settled the fight between individual rights and community beliefs; it's that it showed just how badly our legal system needs a clear, fair way to handle that clash.