Babri Demolition: Allahabad HC to hear petition challenging acquittal of accused persons

The special CBI court in January 2021 acquitted all the accused persons, who were charged with hatching a criminal conspiracy, citing a lack of evidence against them

A petition challenging the acquittal of all the 32 accused persons, including former union ministers L K Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Uma Bharti and some others, by the special CBI court here last year in Babri demolition case, will come up for hearing in the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad high court on Monday.

The petition filed by Haji Mehboob and Syed Akhlaque contended that the CBI court had wrongly acquitted the accused persons. The HC was likely to hear the petitioners on the maintainability of the petition.

The special CBI court in January last year acquitted all the accused persons, who were charged with hatching a criminal conspiracy, citing a lack of evidence against them.

Special Judge (CBI) S K Yadav, in his verdict, had said that the demolition of the disputed structure was not ‘pre-planned’ and that it was the handiwork of some ‘’anti-social elements’’, who were among the thousands of ‘karsevaks’.

‘’There is not enough evidence to show that the demolition was pre-planned,’’ he remarked.

The court said that the incident had happened ‘spontaneously’ and, gave a clean chit to the accused persons, adding that they had in fact tried to stop the ‘karsevaks’ from demolishing the structure.

The special judge had also said that the cassette of the speeches of the accused persons, which were introduced as evidence by the CBI, was ‘’tampered with’’ and were not ‘sealed’. The court also said that the negatives of the photographs of the accused persons were not furnished by the CBI.

Besides Advani, Joshi, Uma Bharti, those acquitted, included Vinay Katyar, Sadhvi Ritambhara, Mahant Nritya Gopal Das, Ram Vilas Vedanti, Mahant Dharm Das, Satish Pradhan, Pawan Kumar Pandey, Lallu Singh, Prakash Verma, Vijay Bahadur Singh, Santosh Dubey, Gandhi Yadav, Ramji Gupta, Braj Bhushan Saran Singh, Kamalesh Tripathi, Ramchandra Khatri, Jai Bhagwan Goyal, Om Prakash Pandey, Jaibhan Singh, Sakshi Maharaj, Vinay Kumar Rai, Naveen Shukla, R N Srivastava, Acharya Dharmendra Dev, Sudhir Kakkad and Dharmednra Gujjar.

The cases pertained to the demolition of the disputed structure in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992, by thousands of 'karsevaks'.