The Supreme Court is supposed to check and balance the executive, apart from illuminating, with definitive clarity, murky tangles of legal principle and propriety with sharply divisive social problems. The Court does stray into pastures where it has no plausible fodder to chew, such as when it orders cinemas to play the national anthem before the screening of a movie and citizens, to stand to attention. But on the whole, the Court lives up to the expectation that it would serve as a solid pillar of Indian democracy.When the ruling party at the Centre manoeuvred to bring under President’s rule states with functional legislatures, the Court intervened to reverse the move. When the central government issued rules that practically ruled out the sale of cattle for slaughter, abrogating both the right of the states to regulate such activity within their territory as well as the right of a large army of workers to earn a livelihood from the meat and leather processing industries, the Court intervened to stay the rules.In these measures, the Court indeed served as the guardian of the Constitution. When the Court asked states to enforce a rule that prohibits the sale of liquor in the vicinity of state and national highways, it threw into disarray large chunks of the hospitality industry. Investment in hotels and bars along highways suddenly turned infructuous.The Court has offered, of late, some relief in relation to properties located within municipal limits but is yet to undo the damage done to investments along highways outside city limits. This week, the Court delivered two momentous decisions, one to invalidate the practice of instant, arbitrary divorce among Muslims and the other, to affirm the right to privacy as a fundamental right, even if not specifically so enumerated in the Constitution.Of particular note in the privacy judgement was the ability and readiness of a nine-member Constitution bench to acknowledge and remedy errors in past findings of the court. Justice Chandrachud set the heartwarming example of listing a judgement by a bench that included his father as having been erroneous, the judgement being the one that accepted a government contention, made during the Emergency, that the right to life and liberty under Article 21could be suspended in certain circumstances.The privacy judgement surveyed several past judgements that refused to cede privacy the status of afundamental right and declared them to be wrong. This ability of the Indian Supreme Court to identify and correct its own past mistakes is most encouraging. It offers grounds for optimism that some egregious errors in the five-member bench’s decision invalidating triple talaq would be remedied, sooner rather than later.In that judgement, three judges, a majority of the five constituting the bench, determined that personal laws are insulated from the reformative scrutiny of fundamental rights , by virtue of being protected by the right to freedom of conscience under Article 25. This is most unfortunate.Can faith and custom prevail over basic democratic rights such as the right to equality, the right to legal remedy and the right to non-discrimination by the state, especially when Article 25 says that the right is subject to considerations of health, morality and public order, apart from other fundamental rights? Unfortunately, the majority answered in the affirmative.Fortunately, one judge nevertheless opined against triple talaq, pushing the opinion of two other judges who found triple talaq to be invalid into a majority. But he based his order against triple talaq on the finding that the practice was not only not integral to Islam but also contravened the spirit of the Quran. Is it the job of justices of the Supreme Court to interpret religious texts? Or is it their job to see if a faith-derived practice or norm falls foul of the Indian Constitution, and if it does, to declare it void in temporal life?The two judges who did not think personal law deserved protection under Article 25 ruled against triple talaq on the ground of arbitrariness, rather than grounding their opinion on equality of men and women. Divorce provisions that privilege the male thus still await judicial annulment . The derivation of arbitrariness from the right to equality is itself of dubious validity, even if based on past rulings.The privacy ruling offered victims of Article 377 shelter under the cloak of privacy. But this is rather flimsy protection. Why should sexual orientation be a matter of privacy, rather than of personal liberty? A major feature of the Supreme Court is its ability to correct errors of its own past. We sincerely hope these errors would get corrected in future judgements as well.