Central Board of Dawoodi Bohra Community & Anr. vs. The State of Maharashtra & Anr. (Writ Petition (Civil) No. 740 of 1986, with Criminal Appeal No. 39 of 1991)
Background
This decades-old writ petition, filed in 1986 by the Central Board of the Dawoodi Bohra Community, sought a direction to give effect to Maharashtra's Bombay Protection of Ex-communication Act, 1949: a law that had been struck down in 1962 by a Constitution Bench in Sardar Syedna Taher Saifuddin Saheb v. State of Bombay as violating the community's right under Article 26(b) to manage its own religious affairs, including the practice of ex-communicating members. While the petition was pending, the Ex-communication Act itself was repealed in 2016 by Maharashtra's Social Boycott Act, raising the threshold question of whether anything survived in the old petition for the Court to decide, and if so, whether the 1962 Sardar Syedna ruling needed to be reconsidered given decades of subsequent constitutional-morality jurisprudence (Sabarimala, Navtej Singh Johar, Puttaswamy).
Decision Breakdown
The Constitution Bench held that the case was not rendered moot by the repeal, because the underlying constitutional question, whether the Dawoodi Bohra community's power of ex-communication is a protected "matter of religion" under Article 26(b), or must yield to concepts of constitutional morality, dignity and other fundamental rights under Part III (particularly Article 21): still needed to be authoritatively settled. The Court traced how ex-communication strips a person of civil rights (property, worship, burial grounds) amounting to virtual "civil death," and noted that the 1962 Sardar Syedna decision never weighed Article 26(b) against Article 21 dignity rights, nor tested the practice against "constitutional morality" as later developed in the Sabarimala Temple judgments. Since a nine-judge bench was already seized of near-identical questions (numbers 3 and 4) in the pending Sabarimala Temple Review reference, the Court held this petition should not be independently decided but instead tagged with that nine-judge reference, and directed the Registry to seek appropriate directions from the Chief Justice of India for listing it accordingly.
Lesson Learnt
Even when the specific statute underlying a decades-old case is repealed, a constitutional question it raises can survive for decision if the underlying legal principle remains live and unsettled; and where a larger bench is already examining the identical constitutional question elsewhere (here, the interplay between religious-denomination rights under Article 26 and other fundamental rights), courts will consolidate related matters before that larger bench rather than deciding piecemeal, to avoid conflicting outcomes on the same point of constitutional law.