THE recent events in Sambhal and the deaths of five young Muslim men underline the importance of the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, l991 enacted by Parliament in that year. This legislation prohibits “conversion of any place of worship” (Section 3) and provides for “the maintenance of the religious character of any place of worship as it existed on the 15^th day of August, 1947” (Section 4). No person can “convert any place of worship of any religious denomination or any section thereof into a place of worship of a different section of the same religious denomination or of a different religious denomination”.  The Ramjanmabhoomi-Babri Masjid dispute was kept out of the purview of the Act.

The judgment of the five-member bench on the Ayodhya dispute in 2019 had also reiterated the validity of the Places of Worship Act and stated that no claims against extant religious places can be entertained by law.  However, the Supreme Court, in May 2022, allowed a survey of the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi.  A petition filed in the district court stated that the mosque was built on the ruins of a demolished temple.  A bench headed by the then Chief Justice of India, D Y Chandrachud, allowed the survey to continue opining that finding the nature of a religious place was not barred under the 1991 Act.  Later the court also held that the petitioners are only seeking to ascertain the status of the place as on August 15, 1947 and not to alter or convert the nature of the place as per the Act.

By this egregious judgment, the flood gates were opened for Hindu communalists to rake up legal disputes at various places where mosques exist.  The demand for the Gyanvapi mosque survey was followed by a similar case in the Eidgah in Mathura and the district court ordered a survey.  The next in turn has been Sambhal. On November 19, the district court allowed a survey of the Mughal era mosque built in 1526 on the basis of an application filed by an advocate, Vishnu Shankar Jain, the one who had earlier moved petitions in the district court of Mathura and Varanasi.  The application was immediately admitted despite the fact that the mosque is a protected monument.  With surprising alacrity, the court went on to set up an Advocate Commission and ordered the survey to be conducted on that day itself.  The survey report was to be submitted on November 29. The Masjid Committee was not even given a hearing. 

With the full cooperation of the Masjid Committee, the survey was carried out. However, on November 24, the survey team arrived at the mosque to conduct another survey. This time, they were accompanied not only by the police, but by a large number of people chanting `Jai Sri Ram’.  A crowd of Muslims collected and soon after the situation went out of control with stone throwing, lathi-charges, tear gas and firing.  Three young Muslim men died with gunshot wounds and two more succumbed to their injuries later.  The local Samajwadi Party MP and the son of a Samajwadi Party MLA have been accused of inciting rioting and violence in FIRs filed by the police. 

In Uttar Pradesh, under the Adityanath regime, there is a full scale offensive on Muslims using any pretext. The communal violence in Bahraich a few weeks ago had led to State repression against the Muslim community and scores of Muslim men were arrested. Hindutva outfits are targeting various mosques to seek legal means to open disputes about them. 

The efforts to rake up a dispute about a 16th century mosque in Sambhal was aided by judicial connivance.  What we have witnessed in local courts across Uttar Pradesh – in Varanasi, Mathura and now in Sambhal – is the planned effort to turn centuries-old mosques into battlegrounds for establishing Hindu supremacy.  The most disturbing fact is that all this was made possible by the Supreme Court itself, under Justice Chandrachud, disregarding the very law which it had earlier ordained everyone to follow.  If this destructive path is to be reversed, then the Supreme Court should immediately intervene and uphold the sanctity of the Places of Worship Act, which disallows any legal dispute to be raised regarding a place of worship after August 15, 1947. 

(November 27, 2024)