By Sushil Kutty
Sambhal and then the Khwaja Ajmer Dargah. The latest is a mosque in Badaun, Uttar Pradesh, where the lower judiciary is again playing Cupid with the villain Hindu, ordering a survey of the Shamsi Shahi Masjid, not willing to concede that surveys of mosques and Muslim shrines are poison to maintaining communal harmony.
Why doesn’t the Hindu take seriously the unwritten code that the majority community has to take responsibility of the Muslim minority’s sensibilities? Don’t ask the question, why? As for “when will it all stop?”, all surveys of mosques across India should come to a stop once and for all the day after it is found that a claim that a mosque stood over a Hindu temple was a complete lie.
Also, some things are best left to stew. So, don’t argue if a TMC Member of Parliament says that regularly performing ‘namaaz’ at a particular premises makes that particular premises Waqf property! Kalyan Banerjee wasn’t on any psychotropic. He is a brilliant lawyer and can quote verbatim from Supreme Court judgments.
Waqf Amendment Bill 2024 JPC Chairman Jagdambika Pal cautioned Kalyan Banerjee and asked him to stick to the JPC brief.
It is very unlikely Kalyan Banerjee will, the Trinamool MP is hard to convince. Just like top Supreme Court advocate Dushyant Dave is in matters concerning ‘law per se’.. In fact, Dave broke down when talking of the surveys in Sambhal and Ajmer and the plight of Muslims subjected to such surveys, which he blames on ex-CJI DY Chandrachud.
Dave would like nothing better than if Hindus didn’t take seriously Justice Chandrachud’s “divine revelations” on the Places of Worship Act. Instead, Hindus should listen to former J&K Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, who is afraid communal riots will break out if Hindu outfits didn’t stop looking for temples under mosques.
Dave and Mehbooba Mufti questioning retired CJI DY Chandrachud’s motives has opened a ‘Pandora’s Box’ even as Mehbooba Mufti observed that CJI Chandrachud had with his loose observations on the Places of Worship Act let loose awful thoughts invade the Hindu’s wounded psyche.
Like they used to say about the native American-Indian, “a good Indian is a dead Indian”, so it should be with the Hindu – “a good Hindu is one who never looks for a mandir under a mosque?” The Places of Worship Act, 1991 spells this out as it goes about disenfranchising the Hindu and stops him from scratching his head and asking what lies under Sambhal’s Shahi Jama Masjid, could it be the Hari Har Mandir?
Such behaviour is anathema for the secular Indian, which Dave and Mehbooba are. Also all Samajwadi Party leaders for whom the lower judiciary’s “small-small judges” are the ones who foment communal disharmony by ordering surveys of mosques.
Hindus have no business asking for the impossible and the Places of Worship Act is about the impossible. Hindus should stop expecting equality before the law in certain matters for the overall good. After all, the Hindu has to not only wait for his turn but also wait on the Muslim. Nothing is jarring, everything is according to the Constitution.
But there are people who are allowed to take grave offence at the even more “grave misstep” of the lower judiciary judges ordering surveys of mosques and dargahs. Mehbooba Mufti and the People’s Conference’s Sajjad Lone warned of “far-reaching consequences for communal harmony” in India if the Hindu asked for a level-playing field.
The Rajasthan court which ordered the survey on the Ajmer Dargah wasn’t thinking of disturbances to communal harmony. It issued notices and now Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti will have to wait for Justice DY Chandrachud’s Pandora’s Box to know his fate!
“Thanks to a former Chief Justice of India a Pandora’s Box has been opened, sparking a contentious debate about minority religious places…The recent violence in Sambhal, Uttar Pradesh is the direct result of this judgment,” said Mehbooba Mufti, scaring everybody in the firmament. “This can result in further bloodshed. The question remains – who will take responsibility?”
The Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991 said that barring Ayodhya, status quo as on August 15, 1947, will have to be maintained at religious places throughout India. Then, in 2023, then CJI DY Chandrachud said that the Act does not stop ascertainment of the religious character of a place of worship. Only when the religious character of a place of worship is ascertained can the Places of Worship Act be applied.
And now advocate Dushyant Dave is angry and sad. The Congress, which brought the Places of Worship Act, is outraged. The Samajwadi Party, which allegedly instigated the violence in Sambhal on November 24, is up in arms against the Yogi Adityanath government. And Muslims everywhere are asking “when will it all stop?”
Among them AIMIM Chief Asaduddin Owaisi, who doesn’t have to act to show his displeasure! “The Dargah has been around for 800 years… Prime Ministers beginning with Jawaharlal Nehru have sent chadars, even Prime Minister Narendra Modi…10 chadars for the 10 years he has been ruling India,” said Owaisi.
It never crosses Owaisi’s mind that no citizen of India can be stopped filing a petition. And the Hindu is as much “citizen of India” as Owaisi and other Muslims living in India are.
How will he when this little fact doesn’t strike top Supreme Court lawyers? Instead of questioning and disparaging the “small-small judges” of the lower courts, people should look up the Constitution of India and brush up on fundamental rights. Nobody is unequal before the law and that includes Hindus if anybody, however exalted, has forgotten.
Lawyering is all about finding loopholes and just like a murder most foul, there is no law in the realm which is perfect; or else, there wouldn’t be need for a Dushyant Dave to stand up in court. It took the genius of CJI DY Chandrachud to spell this out and now, he’s ‘Pandora’s Box’.
Fact of the matter is, the law will take its own course and retired CJI DY Chandrachud’s word will be the last on this contentious topic for a long time.
Politicians like Mehbooba Mufti and Sajjad Lone should stop terrorizing people just for the sake of terrifying. And Sajjad Lone should stop disparaging the “country’s significant section of population”, ridicule them with comments like “even though educated seem to be all invested in the obsession to invent hidden temples.
Lone must not compare Dubai with India. His statement “those educated ones who should have been at the forefront of heralding the Indian tech revolution are busy mythologizing…I was recently in Dubai and had the chance to see magnificence in the form of architecture of the temples that have been built here. What an oasis of tolerance and mutual respect Dubai has turned out to be.”
As for the former president of the Supreme Court Bar Association, his statement that “Justice Chandrachud did a great disservice to the Constitution” by allowing surveys of mosques, shouldn’t cast doubts on the former CJI’s integrity. And if Justice Chandrachud said the Ayodhya judgement was revealed to him by God, it is between him and his God, which is how all Muslims talk about their relationship with their God. (IPA Service)
Supreme Court Must Come To Rescue People From The Communal Fire 