The Supreme Court is set to examine whether a Parsi woman can be treated as having ceased to be a Parsi upon marrying outside the community, reviving a constitutional question pending since 2012.The case arises from a petition by Dina Budhraja, who was denied entry to an agiary (Zoroastrian fire temple) for her grandmother’s funeral in 2024.She had married a Hindu man in 2009 under the Special Marriage Act, 1954 and did not convert to Hinduism, but was informed that the marriage alone excluded her from the community under the Nagpur Parsi Panchayat Rules. Panchayats here refer to the charitable trusts set up by the community across regions to manage its affairs.Her petition cites fundamental rights guaranteed under the Constitution to challenge the exclusion, arguing that it “ostracised” women from their religion and “stripped” them of their identity. A bench comprising Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul M Pancholi has issued notice to the Nagpur Parsi panchayat and the Union Government.The backgroundThe Parsi community is one of the smallest religious minorities in India, with fewer than 60,000 members as per the 2011 Census, concentrated largely across Gujarat and Mumbai. Birth rates are low, the population is ageing, and intermarriage has long been contested. Questions of who counts as a Parsi and who eventually decides that are central here.In 2012, Goolrokh Gupta filed a Special Leave Petition in the SC after the Valsad Parsi Panchayat in Gujarat told her that marrying a non-Parsi under the Special Marriage Act meant she had ceased to be a Parsi. The civil law allows interfaith marriages without conversion, but the panchayat held that it made no difference.The SC constituted a constitution bench to examine the issue, but the matter has been pending since. The Valsad Panchayat allowed Gupta to attend her parents’ funeral prayers inside an agiary.Present case before the SCStory continues below this adIn the 2026 petition, Dina Budhraja said she wrote to the Nagpur Parsi Panchayat for permission to attend her ailing grandmother’s funeral prayers inside the agiary, writing in advance because she knew the answer might be no.In Explained | Do protections for Scheduled Castes carry over with religious conversion? What the law saysThe panchayat’s rule 5(2) states that “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.”The panchayat said that she could sit outside the temple, on the verandah. A month after her grandmother died in September 2024, the panchayat wrote to her, directing her not to represent herself as Parsi at all.Challenge to the ruleThe petition calls Rule 5(2) a “biological absurdity” and “manifestly arbitrary”, pointing out how it only applies to women. A Parsi man who marries outside the faith retains both his religious identity and the right to be in those community spaces.Story continues below this adAdditionally, children of such Parsi men are accepted as Parsi with religious rights, but children of Parsi women who do the same are not. The petition states that “Persons who are biologically 50% Parsi… are considered as Parsis with all rights… But the petitioner who is 100% biologically Parsi is not allowed to enter the Agiary only by virtue of her marriage to a Hindu.”In 2023, Budhraja organised a Navjote ceremony for her son’s induction into the Zoroastrian faith, but the panchayat’s managing committee publicly objected to it and circulated messages about it on social media.The petition challenges the rules on three constitutional grounds.*Under Article 14 (equality before the law), the argument states that the rule’s classification rests entirely on gender. The Supreme Court’s test for reasonable classification requires that a distinction be grounded in a real and relevant difference between the groups being treated differently.Here, the only operative difference between a Parsi man who marries outside the community and a Parsi woman who does the same is their gender. It states that, “the impugned provision… subjects women alone to exclusion, denial of religious access, and loss of identity.”Story continues below this adAlso Read | Parsis of Delhi: How the small community survived, thrived and made the Capital their home*Under Article 21 (protection of right to life), the petition draws on a line of Supreme Court judgments, holding that the freedom to choose a life partner is part of the constitutionally protected right to dignity and autonomy. It states that a rule which strips a woman of her religious identity and community access for her marital choice functions as a penalty for that choice.While the rule does not prevent the choice itself, it makes the cost of exercising that choice fall entirely on women. The rule, it says, “entrenches patriarchal notions whereby a woman’s identity is treated as derivative of her husband’s”, treating Parsi women as “subordinate to Parsi men”.*Under Article 25 (freedom of religion), the petition questions whether the Nagpur Parsi Panchayat, as a trust, has the authority to impose this consequence at all. In Jamshed Kanga v Parsi Panchayat Funds (2011), the Bombay High Court held that excommunication has no place in Zoroastrian doctrine and that no such power has been vested in any person.Given that Budhraja married under a civil law without converting her religion, the petition argues that a trust cannot treat her as having renounced a faith she continues to practise.Story continues below this adIt also distinguishes between “Parsi” and “Zoroastrian”. Citing the 1909 decision in Sir Dinsha Maneckji Petit, the petition argues that ‘Parsi’ denotes lineage and community, which is rooted in descent, while ‘Zoroastrian’ denotes religion. “A person born to Parsi parents remains a Parsi by birth… such ethnic identity cannot be extinguished by marriage.”What the court will decideCourts have generally avoided entering questions of internal religious governance. The Constitution protects the right of religious denominations to manage their own affairs, but that protection is not absolute. The reference to a Constitution Bench in the Goolrokh case indicates that the court saw the issue as raising a constitutional question.It also highlights the absence of uniform practice, as Parsi panchayats in Delhi and Kolkata do not treat women who marry outside the faith as having lost their identity. If the rule were a matter of doctrine, the expectation would be consistency.The court will have to decide whether such a rule can stand alongside guarantees of equality, personal liberty and religious freedom.