Babri Majid demolition. (Express Archives)A Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi will consider a batch of petitions challenging the Allahabad High Court order in Ram Janambhoomi-Babri Masjid title dispute case on January 4. The bench, also comprising justice S K Kaul, is likely to fix a date for further hearing of the appeals.
On October 29, ignoring a Uttar Pradesh government’s request to hear the matter urgently, a bench of CJI Ranjan Gogoi and justices S K Kaul and K M Joseph had ordered that the matter be listed in the first week of January 2019 before an “appropriate bench”, which, it said, would take a call on the date of hearing.
The appeals, which were filed in 2010 and had come up for hearing in 2017, dragged on for various reasons — initially, as the documents had not been fully translated, and later as one of the parties supporting the mosque questioned the findings of the SC constitution bench in 1994 in the Dr M Ismail Faruqui Etc versus Union of India and Others case.
The objection was to a statement in the 1994 judgment, that a mosque was not an “essential part of the practice of the religion of Islam” and hence, “its acquisition (by state) is not prohibited by provisions in the Constitution of India”.
Petitioner had contended that earlier decisions in the Ayodhya title case were influenced by this statement and demanded that it be sent do a larger bench for reconsideration.
However, in a majority of 2-1 verdict in September 27 this year, the apex court rejected the demand. The order had cleared the way for the final hearing on the appeals.
