Is the Supreme Court Asking the Right Questions About FGM?

After more than seven years of legal limbo, the Supreme Court is set to hear a constitutional challenge to female genital mutilation (FGM) in India, bringing a deeply intimate and brutal practice back into sharp public focus.Filed in 2017, a PIL sought the court to declare the practice unconstitutional, while pushing for specific legislation to ensure accountability under existing criminal law.KK Venugopal, then Attorney General, agreed, “This practice has to be stopped. It has been declared as a crime in (many other) countries.” And yet, no final judgment was delivered by the court. And so, FGM continues in India even in 2026.“What has happened in the interim? Hundreds of girls have been cut because the practice continues, unabated,” Masooma Ranalvi, an FGM-survivor involved in the petition, tells The Quint.Can We At Least Accept That FGM Exists? In India, FGM—locally referred to as ‘khatna’ or ‘khafz’—is practised primarily among Dawoodi, Suleimani, and Alvi Bohra communities, as well as some Sunni Muslim sub-sects in Kerala, where it is known as ‘Sunnath.’Studies suggest that in Bohra communities, a significant majority of girls—often around the age of seven—have undergone the procedure, even as its full extent remains under-documented.Justice delayed can, indeed, feel like justice denied. But better late than never, the case has since grown into something far larger than a single petition, and is now being heard before a nine-judge bench, alongside a cluster of disputes—on Sabarimala, mosque entry, and Parsi women’s rights—that collectively force the court to confront an old, unresolved question: how far can claims of religious freedom stretch when they collide with bodily autonomy and equality?But the question that leads to is whether, by placing something as physically invasive, and usually non-consensual, as FGM alongside questions of temple entry or access to religious spaces, the court is—inadvertently, perhaps—collapsing fundamentally different kinds of claims into a single framework of religious freedom.Khula Without Consent: Why Muslim Women Still Can’t Exit Marriage FreelyNone of these cases it has been clubbed with are unimportant, of course, with many of them emerging from long, difficult struggles led by women seeking entry, recognition, and dignity within deeply entrenched religious systems.So, while collapsing them into a hierarchy of ‘more’ or ‘less’ significant harm would be both reductive and ethically misplaced, it is also analytically necessary to acknowledge that they do not—at all—raise the same kind of constitutional question since issues of access and exclusion should, logically, operate very differently from practices that involve direct, irreversible harm to the body. After all, arguably, the former is a civil matter, while the latter is a criminal one.Treating both through the same constitutional lens risks obscuring that distinction. Because at some point, the question can no longer remain limited to what a religion requires or permits but has to confront what the Constitution can—and, more importantly, cannot—allow to be done in its name, especially when the harm in question is physical, enduring, and, for many, impossible to undo.The Forbidden Debate: India’s Hidden FGM Crisis“Two women held me... and they closed my eyes so that I could not see what was happening... I had never been touched in that place before... I still get shivers down my spine when I recall that,” Sana, a 49-year-old woman who was tricked by her grandmother into undergoing FGM when she was just seven, stated in a 2018 report.“I don’t remember [feeling pain]. I think the mental trauma, the mental thing was more, rather than the physical thing.”Published in collaboration with WeSpeakOut, a survivor-led movement to end FGM among Bohras, the report also includes testimonies from other survivors. One of them is Parveen, a 29-year-old Sunni Muslim woman from Kerala, who doesn’t remember undergoing FGM at all. Still, it has left a lifelong impact on her.“It was only after my marriage when I had a lot of pain during my first sexual intercourse, my husband told me that I am feeling this pain because I don’t have this part (clitoris) in my body, and therefore, I can’t feel pleasure while having sex… When I touch it out there, I don’t have any sexual feelings at all. It is just like touching any other part of the skin.”She points out that unlike her, not every FGM survivor has a supportive husband to help them work through it, which risks jeopardising their marital lives.Menstrual Leave Isn’t a Privilege. It’s a Right India Has Ignored for 78 YearsThe ‘essential religious practices’ test, in theory, will allow the court to distinguish between what is core to a religion and what is not, offering a way to intervene without rewriting belief itself. In practice, however, it places judges in the uneasy position of having to interpret theology, sift through competing claims of authenticity, and ultimately decide what a religion needs in order to remain itself. It’s an exercise that is likely as unstable as it sounds. And yet, it is the framework into which FGM has been pulled.And this shift did not happen in a vacuum. During the earlier hearings, a group called the Dawoodi Bohra Women for Religious Freedom (DBWRF) intervened to oppose the PIL, arguing that the practice constituted a protected aspect of their faith.Their presence was crucial in reframing the issue—not as one of bodily harm, but of religious rights—effectively pushing the case into the current constitutional framework. “Their whole defense is that this is religion, and you cannot touch it.”Masooma RanalviInterestingly, though, as Ranalvi points out, the practice predates Islam, and is not confined to a single religion. It has been documented across communities globally, including among Christians and tribal groups, which not only complicates attempts to frame it narrowly as a Muslim-issue since it’s not related to Islam, but also risks feeding into already entrenched Islamophobic narratives.Despite that, the emergence of such organised support for a practice that is, prima facie, so violative of a person’s rights over their own bodies—basically, a violent human rights violation—reflects how deeply internalised and socially reinforced it is, sustained by community pressure and well-resourced advocacy that works to normalise it. And that pressure is lived, negotiated, and often enforced within families themselves.As Munira, a 39-year-old mother to a young daughter, said in 2018,“When my daughter became six years old, my mother started calling me up to remind me that I must get her khatna done… There is so much pressure from all around that you do end up doing [it] on your daughter.”Yet another mother, Rubina, 38, had undergone FGM herself when she was too young to understand what was happening with her, but didn’t want her daughters to endure it. So, her own mother took her granddaughters away on the pretext of buying them goodies, and had the procedure performed on them.Rubina recalls:“I questioned my mother why she didn’t tell me she was taking the girls? She said if she had told me, would I have allowed her to take them? She said she had decided that she would make sure she gets the girls circumcised, and hence she didn’t tell me.”This is, at its core, how internalised misogyny enforces patriarchy, by women onto other women and girls. It complicates easy narratives of victim and perpetrator, revealing, instead, how systems sustain themselves by recruiting those within them.The presence of groups like DBWRF cannot be understood outside this context, where belief, pressure, and belonging intersect in ways that make resistance both necessary and extraordinarily difficult. And at the center of it all is a rupture of trust between a child and the very women she is taught will keep her safe.As Ranalvi puts it, “It was a sense of betrayal… we were taken under a guise… we were not told that we have been taken for something like this.”And this deeply embodied, lived reality of harm, coercion, and silence is at risk of being flattened when translated into abstract constitutional questions, which raises an even more uncomfortable question of whether by even entertaining FGM primarily through the lens of religious freedom, the court has already conceded too much ground to that framing.Violence of Any Form is Unacceptable. India Must Criminalise Marital RapeBecause once harm is made contingent on whether a practice is ‘essential’ to religion, the terms of the debate shift from asking whether a constitutional injury exists, to asking whether belief can justify it. In doing so, the burden is no longer on the practice to withstand scrutiny, but on those challenging it to first dislodge its religious legitimacy.And that is a far more uncertain task that risks delaying justice in the very moment it is most urgently needed.Unfortunately, though, even if that hurdle is crossed, the path to accountability remains far from straightforward.“Even if the Supreme Court holds that FGM is not an essential religious practice, it does not automatically result in a ban. It primarily removes constitutional protection, and any prohibition would still require legislative action or a clear judicial direction,” a lawyer working on the case explained to The Quint, while preferring to remain anonymous.In other words, the current hearing is not the end of the road, but merely one stage in a longer legal process that could still leave survivors waiting. And the gaps do not end there either. “In the absence of a specific anti-FGM law, existing provisions under the Indian Penal Code [IPC]/Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita [BNS] and POCSO [Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012] can be invoked, but their application remains interpretative and often inconsistent in practice.”Lawyer who spoke on condition of anonymityThis legal ambiguity means that even where—and, in this case, if—harm is acknowledged, enforcement can remain contingent on a variety of factors, further complicating the already fragile terrain between recognition and justice.She Earns, But He Owns: Why India’s Gender Wealth Gap Still Goes UnseenAt stake, then, is not just the outcome of this case, but the framework through which it is decided. Because if the Constitution is forced to negotiate with harm only after it has been filtered through religion, it risks setting a precedent where the question is no longer whether something violates rights, but whether it does so in a way that is permissible. And that is a far more dangerous question to leave unanswered.What the Supreme Court chooses to prioritise here—belief or bodily integrity—will not just determine the fate of this petition, but signal how far constitutional protections can stretch when they’re confronted with practices that are so deeply entrenched in the culture of communities.And if the law cannot respond decisively to harm simply because it is claimed in the name of faith, would it count as neutrality, or appear as a symptom of belief being treated as more inviolable than the bodies it acts upon? Because for those who continue to live with the consequences of that harm, this procedural delay is lived, cumulative, and irreversibly traumatising.(DevRupa Rakshit is a queer, autistic individual, ARTivist and independent multimedia journalist based in Bengaluru. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)

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Is the Supreme Court Asking the Right Questions About FGM?

'Hundreds of girls have been cut because the practice continues, unabated,” said FGM-survivor Masooma Ranalvi.

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Topics: Female genital mutilation FGM Victims of FGM