Can't deny tribal women ancestral property: SC

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that denying a tribal woman or her legal heirs a share in ancestral property on the sole ground of gender is both unreasonable and unconstitutional. The judgment affirmed equal inheritance rights for women in tribal communities

- Utkarsh Anand

The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that denying a tribal woman or her legal heirs a share in ancestral property on the sole ground of gender is both unreasonable and unconstitutional.

The judgment affirmed equal inheritance rights for women in tribal communities, even in the absence of statutory personal law, reversing a longstanding assumption that customs restricting such rights must be presumed to exist unless proven otherwise.

While the Hindu Succession Act (HSA), 1956, does not apply to scheduled tribes (STs), the court made it clear that this exclusion cannot be stretched to infer that tribal women are not entitled to inherit ancestral property. It underlined that unless a specific customary bar is proved, equality must prevail.

The verdict, delivered by a bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and Joymalya Bagchi, came in a case involving the legal heirs of an ST woman from Chhattisgarh, who had sought a share in the estate of her maternal grandfather.

Their claim was opposed by male family members, who argued that tribal custom barred women from inheritance.