We examine the impact of the Supreme Court judgment on sex-selective abortion. In the 1980s, the Indian child sex ratio, a ratio comparing the number of male Indian children to female Indian children, began to shift significantly towards a male skew. As ultrasounds became widely available in India, many women used them to determine the future sex of their fetuses and to abort female fetuses. In response, the Indian Parliament prohibited medical professionals from revealing the future sex of the fetus to women in 1994. In 2003, the Indian Supreme Court responded to a public interest litigation petition by pushing for amendment and greater enforcement of the Act. We examine the sex ratio data with 1998, before the Indian Supreme Court’s decision in 2003, and ending in 2008. Our data draw from two large-scale nationally representative cross-sectional household surveys covering all districts of India. We compare these data to the average annual probability of female-births among all ever born children from the same time period. The sex ratio continued to become more male-skewed after the Court’s decision.

The chapter examines the relationship between India’s higher judiciary judgments on affirmative action benefits and the response of the Hindu Right to religious conversion. It makes three arguments: First, progressive court interventions can be impeded by restrictive constitutional provisions. India’s judges are hamstrung by the embedded contradiction in the law, which, in its pursuit of one constitutional goal (social justice) has undermined another (religious freedom). Second, even if judges aspire to implement the spirit of the law, and try to provide an equitable result to these groups, their efforts need not produce positive social change. Third, contrary to the view that apex courts produce moderating effects in the arena of religious freedom, judgments have unintended and deleterious impact on religious toleration and may deepen polarization. The empirical analysis highlights this argument by examining the impact on the access of religious converts from Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe groups to affirmative action benefits in 80 religious conversion cases from 1950-2006 in India's higher judiciary. It scrutinizes the Hindu Right's historical and contemporary responses (in parliamentary debates, newschapter reports, and interviews), to these judgments and highlights the unintended consequences of the courts' decisions, namely religious polarization.