Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna’s directive to trial courts to not pass any “effective orders” is a very welcome decision.
Dec 14, 2024 06:45 IST First published on: Dec 14, 2024 at 06:45 IST
The Supreme Court Thursday barred district courts across the country from registering fresh suits challenging the ownership and title of any place of worship or ordering surveys of disputed religious places until further orders. Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna’s directive to trial courts to not pass any “effective orders” is a very welcome decision. This intervention, which comes just two weeks after four lives were lost in Uttar Pradesh’s Sambhal in the violence that followed the survey of the town’s medieval mosque, was long overdue. On May 21, 2022, an oral observation by then CJI D Y Chandrachud that a survey would not violate the 1991 Places of Worship Act, effectively, became the basis for several such suits and surveys, including the one in Sambhal.
As the court now frames the challenge to the 1991 Places of Worship Act, the fraught history that led to its enactment is inescapable. The law was brought in by the then Congress government of Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao at a time when the Ram temple movement was at its peak. The promise it held was that a diverse nation would not allow the ghosts of history hijack its future. When it was passed and, subsequently, the BJP has criticised this law as being a tool of appeasement. In four weeks, the Centre will have to now tell the SC whether it will defend or oppose the law, or what its interpretation is. The political faceoff between the BJP and the Congress was, of course, the prime mover behind the 1991 law but the SC was right in ensuring that it cannot be bypassed through majoritarian speak or hastily propped up — and often choreographed — battles in lower courts.
One of the judges on the bench Thursday, Justice KV Viswanathan, prudently pointed out that the 1991 law is only an “effective manifestation or a reiteration of the already embedded constitutional principles.” In 2020, while deciding the Ayodhya dispute, the SC had said that the law embodied a constitutional commitment to “equality of all religions and secularism which is a part of the basic structure of the Constitution.” The ruling had also recognised “non-retrogression” as a foundational feature of the constitution. In this, the 75th year of the Constitution, the guiding light for the republic, what happens to the Places of Worship Act could very well decide the role of history in shaping this diverse nation’s future. The Supreme Court’s stay is the recognition that core constitutional values — a commitment to equality and the right to freedom of religion — need a higher bar and protection. Clearly, the court’s task, as the political debate over the law gathers pace, is cut out.
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