Places of Worship Act challenged again, plea cites barbaric invaders

Satya Prakash

New Delhi, June 7

A fresh petition in the Supreme Court on Tuesday challenged the validity of certain provisions of the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991, on the ground that it legalised the illegal occupation of ancient and historical places of worship and pilgrimage by “barbaric foreign invaders”.

This is the eighth petition against the controversial law that 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. Earlier, Vishwa Bhadra Pujari Purohit Mahasangh, Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay, Subharanian Swamy, Rudra Vikram Singh, Chandra Shekhar, Devakinandan Thakur and Swami Jitendranand had moved the top court against various provisions of the Act.

The Supreme Court had, in March 2021, issued a notice to the Centre on some of the petitions challenging the validity of certain provisions of the 1991 Act.

Petitioner Anil Kabotra, a retired Army officer, contended that the 1991 law 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”.

Kobatra has challenged the constitutional validity of Sections 2, 3, and 4 of the 1991 Act on the ground that Parliament “transgressed its legislative power” by barring remedy of judicial review — a basic feature of the Constitution and the impugned provisions violated principles of secularism.

Fire at SC complex

New Delhi: A fire broke out on Tuesday morning at a UCO Bank branch in the SC complex but no casualty was reported, sources said. At least six fire tenders immediately reached the spot and put out the fire by 10 am, sources said. TNS