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Ayodhya: SC verdict on deferment plea today
R Sedhuraman
Legal Correspondent

New Delhi, September 27
A day ahead of the Supreme Court hearing on the Ayodhya dispute, the UP Sunni Central Waqf Board — the Number 1 respondent in the case — has strongly opposed the plea for another attempt at reconciliation.

A “feeling of the failure of rule of law” would set in if the verdict of the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court was deferred further, Saleemuddin Khan, law officer of the Board, said in an affidavit filed in response to the SC notice.

Further, there was “no justification for the non-pronouncement of the judgment in the Babri Masjid suits even after 60 years” and there was no provision in the Civil Procedure Code to allow the parties to the dispute to “resile” from their stand taken in the HC and go for mediation, the Board said.

The dispute over the ownership of the site “cannot be resolved through the medium of mediation, conciliation or arbitration” and this had been proved time and again in the past 60 years, he averred.

A three-member Bench, headed by Chief Justice SH Kapadia, would hear a petition filed by retired civil servant RC Tripathi tomorrow morning. Justices Aftab Alam and KS Radhakrishnan are the other members of the Bench.

On September 24, a Bench comprising Justices RV Raveendran and HL Gokhale had stayed the delivery of the verdict by the HC, which had been slated for the next day and issued notice to all the 28 respondents. The Bench also referred the petition to the CJI for posting it before a larger Bench as the two Judges had sharply differed on the plea for deferring the HC verdict and facilitating reconciliation.

Meanwhile, senior counsel MN Krishnamani, three-time president of the SC Bar Association who appeared for Hindus in the case before the Full Bench of the HC, has written letters to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi.

According to Krishnamani, the entire Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid area should be made into a Sarva Dharma pilgrim spot, representing all the six major religions practised in India -- Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism. This would turn Ayodhya into an abode of peace, true to the meaning of the place. Ayodhya in Sanskrit means a place where there would be eternal harmony, he said.