The Supreme Court will Today (Dec 5) hear a batch of petitions challenging the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991, including those that question the validity of certain provisions of the act. The bench of Chief Justice of India (CJI) Sanjiv Khanna and Justice PV Sanjay Kumar, also had before it pleas supporting the Act and seeking directions for its proper enforcement.
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New Delhi: The Supreme Court will on Thursday hear a batch of petitions challenging the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991, including those that question the validity of certain provisions of the act.
The bench of Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna and Justice PV Sanjay Kumar, also had before it pleas supporting the Act and seeking directions for its proper enforcement.
The Supreme Court had first issued notice to the Centre seeking its reply to the pleas challenging the Act in March 2021. Following that, it has issued notices on several related pleas and applications and tagged all matters so they could be heard together.
Six petitions have been submitted in this matter, including one from the World Bhadra Pujari Purohit Federation, Dr. Subramanian Swamy, Ashwini Upadhyay, and the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind. While some petitioners are seeking to have the Act invalidated, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind filed a petition in favor of it.
Recently, in response to a lower court’s ruling, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind requested an expedited hearing from the Supreme Court. This case originated from a survey conducted at the historic Shahi Jama Masjid in Sambhal by a court commissioner.
The Places of Worship Act, 1991, which prohibits the alteration of any place of worship and requires the preservation of its religious character as it existed on August 15, 1947, first challenged by Hindu petitioners in the Supreme Court back in 2020. Conversely, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind’s support for the Act came in the form of a petition filed in 2022.
The Supreme Court will hear all related petitions together on December 5.
The Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act prohibits the conversion of places of worship and mandates the preservation of their religious character as it existed on August 15, 1947.
On May 20, 2022, during a hearing related to the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi, the Supreme Court made oral comments indicating that determining the religious character of a place of worship is not prohibited by the Act.
WHAT IS THE PLACES OF WORSHIP ACT
It is an act to prohibit conversion of any place of worship and to provide for the maintenance of the religious character of any place of worship as it existed on August 15, 1947. Under Section, no person will convert any place of worship of any religious denomination into a place of worship of a different religious denomination.
Section 4 of the act says that the religious character of a place of worship will continue to be the same as it existed on August 15, 1947.
It further says that any suit or legal proceeding with respect to the conversion of the religious character of any place of worship pending before any court, shall abate and no fresh suit or legal proceedings shall be instituted.
PETITIONS BEFORE THE SUPREME COURT
The lead petition by Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay has challenged the constitutional validity of Sections 2, 3, 4 of the act, stating that they not only offend Articles of the Constitution but also violate principles of secularism.
The plea states that barbaric invaders destroyed a number of places of worship and pilgrimage to make Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and Sikhs realise that they have been conquered and have to follow the dictum of a ruler, and even after independence, they cannot seek judicial remedy to undo the barbarian acts.
It has been further argued that the act was enacted in the garb of “Public order“, which is a State subject, and similarly, pilgrimage, other than pilgrimages to places outside India, is also a State subject. Therefore, the Centre has no legislative competence to enact the impugned Act.
Meanwhile, the plea by Vishwa Bhadra Pujari Purohit Mahasangh has also made similar notions, stating that the act has barred the right and remedy of Hindu devotees against encroachment made on religious property of Hindus exercising power by followers of another faith.
Further, that property once vested in the deity continues to be the deity’s irrespective of the fact that any person has taken illegal possession of the same.
Calling the act ‘void ab initio‘, meaning invalid from the beginning, BJP leader Subramanian Swamy has in his plea said that Article 25 guarantees that all people equally and freely profess, practice and propagate religion, but the act bars devout Hindus from praying at such temples where, due to foreign aggression, conversion transpired.
Seeking similar relief, a plea filed by Karunesh Shukla states that the act caused extremely large injury to Hindus, Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs and takes away their right to judicial remedy.
Another plea filed by Anil Tripathi and Dinesh Sharma states that citizens have the right to restore its past glory and nullify the signs of slavery and atrocities committed by invaders, and the Centre cannot enact laws to legalise barbarian acts of invaders.
The Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind filed their petition in 2022 seeking directions for effective enforcement of the act.
It says that in blatant violation of the 1991 Act, the Muslim places of worship are being made the subject of frivolous controversies and suits, which are patently barred under the 1991 Act.
However, despite the existence of a statutory bar, such proceedings are permitted to proceed, often with interim orders altering the status quo which has been maintained for ages in such Muslim places of worship.
The plea also sought guidelines for effectively dealing with cases which are based on the sole premise of correcting historical wrongs and changing the existing character of a place of worship belonging to one religious denomination to that of another.
In its plea filed last month, the Committee of Management Anjuman Intezamia Masajid Varanasi, which manages the Gyanvapi mosque, seeks to intervene in the case saying that the ‘purported grievance’ of the petitioner as regards ancient rulers of the past cannot be addressed by the Supreme Court nor is a valid ground for challenging the constitutional validity of the 1991 Act.
The committee has relied on the court verdict in the Ram Janmabhoomi case to defend the validity of theact, saying that the judgement has recognised the principle of non- retrogression as a core component of secularism, which in itself is the basic structure of the Constitution.
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