Ayodhya verdict likely to be in frontlines of the battle for Places of Worship Act in SC

Supreme Court's 2019 Ram Janmabhoomi judgment sparks legal battle over Places of Worship Act validity, highlighting historical wrongs.

The Supreme Court’s Ram Janmabhoomi case judgment in 2019, which gave the title of the disputed Babri Masjid site to the Hindu side, finds itself in the vanguard of a legal battle on the validity of the Places of Worship Act.

Observations made in the judgment impresses, in less than 10 pages, the necessity to keep alive a Central law so “intrinsically related to the obligations of a secular state”.

A Special Bench headed by Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna is scheduled to hear the challenge to the Places of Worship Act, 1991 on December 12 even as multiple legal actions instituted by Hindu plaintiffs in local courts across States like Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan question the character of several mosques and even the Ajmer dargah.

The challenge to the validity of the 1991 Act began trickling in even before a year passed after the Ayodhya judgment in November 2019. The petitions have highlighted the wrongs done during the distant Mughal period. The petitioners find the 1991 Act, which mandates the preservation of the character of religious places of worship across faiths as they existed on August 15, 1947, a hindrance to reclaim lost temples.

However, the petitioners would have to address the Constitution Bench’s mandate in the Ayodhya judgment that the state and citizens have a positive obligation under Article 51A to preserve religious harmony and protect the equality of all faiths - an essential constitutional value and a norm which has the status of being a basic feature of the Constitution.

“The law [Places of Worship Act] speaks to our history and to the future of the nation. Cognizant as we are of our history and of the need for the nation to confront it, Independence was a watershed moment to heal the wounds of the past. Historical wrongs cannot be remedied by the people taking the law in their own hands. In preserving the character of places of public worship, Parliament has mandated in no uncertain terms that history and its wrongs shall not be used as instruments to oppress the present and the future,” the five-judge Bench in the 2019 Ayodhya judgment said.

The Bench said the protection of the 1991 Act was unavailable only in cases in which the conversion of a religious character of a place of worship had taken place after August 15, 1947 and a legal action had been pending at the commencement of the statute.