Express view: on temples, mosques and history, a welcome order

The Supreme Court on Thursday ordered district courts across the country to register fresh cases challenging the ownership and name of any religious site or conduct a survey of disputed religious sites until further orders. Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna’s direction to trial courts not to pass any “effective order” is a very welcome decision. The intervention, which comes two weeks after four people were killed in violence following a survey of the town’s medieval mosque in Sambhal, Uttar Pradesh, was long overdue. On May 21, 2022, the then CJI DY Chandrachud’s oral observation that a survey does not effectively violate the Places of Worship Act, 1991 became the basis for many such cases and surveys, including the one in Sambhal.

As the Court now challenges the Places of Worship Act of 1991, the history fraught with its enactment is inescapable. The Congress government of the then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao brought the law when the Ram Temple movement was at its peak. It was promised that the diverse nation would not allow the ghosts of history to hijack its future. When it was passed and since, the BJP has criticized the law as a tool of appeasement. In four weeks, the Center will now have to tell the SC whether it defends or opposes the law or interprets it. Of course, the political face-off between the BJP and the Congress was the prime mover behind the 1991 law but the SC was right in ensuring that it could not be presented as a majoritarian speech or hurried – and often choreographed – battles in the lower courts.