India, July 18 -- 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 long-standing 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, equal...