Supreme Court to hear on April 5 petitions challenging validity of Places of Worship Act, 1991

Tribune News Service

Satya Prakash

New Delhi, March 27

The Supreme Court will hear on April 5 petitions challenging the validity of certain provisions of the Paces of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991, which prohibited filing of lawsuits to reclaim a place of worship or seek a change in its character from what prevailed on August 15, 1947.

A Bench led by Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud on Monday agreed to take up the petitions on the date fixed after advocate Ashwini Upadhyay, one of the petitioners, submitted that the matter was already listed for hearing on April 5 and it should not be deleted from the list of business on that day.

“It will not be deleted on that day,” the CJI said.

The top court had on January 9 asked the Centre to respond to petitions challenging the validity of certain provisions of the 1991 Act.

A CJI-led Bench, which has already issued notice on the petitions, had given the Centre time till the end of February to submit its response to the petitions against the Act.

The petitioners and intervenors included BJP leader Subramanian Swamy and Ashwini Upadhyay, retired Army officer Anil Kabotra, advocates Chandra Shekhar and Rudra Vikram Singh, Devkinandan Thakur Ji, Swami Jeetendranand Saraswati, and former Bharatiya Janata Party MP Chintamani Malviya, besides others.

The petitions are being seen as an attempt to start a legal battle to reclaim disputed religious sites at Kashi, Mathura and some other places where disputed mosques stand.

In a unanimous verdict on November 9, 2019, on the Ayodhya issue, a five-judge Bench headed by the then CJI Ranjan Gogoi had described the 1991 Act as a legislative instrument designed to protect the secular features of Indian polity.

But now the petitioners have sought directions to declare key provisions of the 1991 Act unconstitutional, contending the top court’s remarks were mere observations without any judicial force as the Act was not under challenge before it.

Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind – a prominent Muslim organisation—has also moved the Supreme Court seeking dismissal of petitions challenging the validity of the Act, saying it will open floodgates of litigation against countless mosques across India and “the religious divide from which the country is recovering in the aftermath of the Ayodhya dispute will only be widened.”

The controversial 1991 Act created a retrospective cut-off date and declared that the character of places of worship shall be maintained as it was on August 15, 1947.

The petitioners contended that it created an “arbitrary and irrational retrospective cut-off date” of August 15, 1947, for maintaining the character of the places of worship or pilgrimage against encroachment done by “fundamentalist-barbaric invaders and law-breakers”.

Parliament can’t restrain Hindu devotees to get back their religious places of worship through judicial process and cannot make any law which takes away or abridges the vested religious right of devotees and cannot make any law with retrospective effect, they submitted.

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