New Delhi: A five-judge Constitution Bench will decide when to consider the Ayodhya case, on Friday. The Supreme Court bench is headed by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi. The case is on pending for six decades and at the heart of India’s most politically divisive row, comes amid demands to speed up the plan to build a Ram temple at the site where the 16th-century Babri mosque stood before it was razed by Hindu activists in 1992.
On Friday, the top court had deferred the Ayodhya case in just a 60-second hearing, and said a bench would decide on January 10 when to take up the case. The dispute is over 2.7 acres of land on which the Babri Masjid stood before it was demolished on December 6, 1992. As we know, in 2010, the Allahabad High Court accepted that the disputed site was the birthplace of Lord Ram and allotted two-thirds of it to the Hindus. The rest went to the Sunni Central Waqf Board of Uttar Pradesh. Both Hindu and Muslim organisations appealed against it in the Supreme Court, which in 2011, stayed the High Court order.
In October, the Supreme Court rejected the Uttar Pradesh government’s appeal for an early hearing of the 14 petitions in the case. Refusal of the court for an early hearing pushed right-wing groups and a section of the BJP to demand that the government bypass the legal process and expedite temple construction through an ordinance of executive order.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said once ” Let the judicial process be over. After the judicial process is over, whatever be our responsibility as government, we are ready to make all efforts”. History says that the 16th-Century Babri Majid was razed on December 6, 1992, by thousands of right-wing volunteers or Kar Sewaks, who claimed it was built on a temple marking the birthplace of Lord Ram that was destroyed. Around 2,000 people were killed in the riots that followed the demolition.
The four other judges on the Constitution Bench are Justice SA Bobde, Justice NV Ramana, Justice UU Lalit and Justice DY Chandrachud.
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