Vocabulary as the Cause of Action: The limits of the Supreme Court’s latest Gender Sensitivity Report

WHEN THE SUPREME COURT released the Handbook on Combating Gender Stereotypes (‘the Handbook’) in 2023, the then Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud explained the need to combat the “inadvertent” perpetuation of gender stereotypes, and in particular “judgments which have referred to a woman as a ‘concubine’ when she is in a relationship.” In family law, the term ‘concubine’ is more than an insult; it precisely identifies a cause of action. It may be used to decide a wife’s entitlement to maintenance or to establish grounds for desertion, cruelty, and adultery in divorce proceedings. The 2023 Handbook set out to retire the word, and so does the new 2026 Report, Judgments and Gender (Sensitivity and Compassion in Writing Judgments) (‘the Report’). 

While reform that sanitises language and nomenclature works when the words it retires only describe a person, can it do the same when those words define legal status and entitlement? This piece follows that gap into the Report’s treatment of non-marital relationships. Stripping judgments of degrading language is simple, but excising that language from the status-based legal rights it defines is not. The Report seems to assume that the first accomplishes the second.

Changes from the 2023 Handbook

The Report is not a sequel to the Handbook. While the latter was an administrative product of the Supreme Court’s e-Committee, published without any judicial order requiring its use, the Report sprang from an adjudicated case. In March 2025, the Allahabad High Court reduced charges against two accused persons who had “committed sexually offensive acts” against a minor girl, finding that their actions only reached the stage of “preparation,” not attempt. The Supreme Court set the order aside in February 2026, finding the case for graver charges “clearly and inevitably” made out on the facts alleged. In the same order, the Court directed the National Judicial Academy, through director Justice Aniruddha Bose, to constitute a Committee of Experts to develop “Guidelines to Inculcate Sensitivity and Compassion into Judges and Judicial Processes …”.  During the proceedings in February, Chief Justice Surya Kant reportedly remarked that the Handbook was “too Harvard-oriented” for a rape survivor, her family, or the ordinary litigant to use. 

The Committee’s report was approved by an oral order on July 14, 2026, directing that it “shall serve as a mandatory guiding resource in matters involving sexual offences and other cases concerning vulnerable persons,” to be uploaded on every court website and circulated to police for use in FIRs and chargesheets.

Whereas the Handbook addressed gender stereotyping broadly, reaching into marital and domestic roles, the Report’s mandate extends only to sexual offences and vulnerable victims and witnesses. This narrower focus arguably reflects a broader judicial pushback against the Handbook’s seemingly elitist framing. Beyond the oral ‘Harvard-oriented’ remark, the July order explicitly faulted “earlier guidelines” for being “framed with reference to a predominantly anglicised model of court functioning.” Despite this critique, neither any order, nor the Report itself, says what becomes of the Handbook outside sexual-offence matters.