Muslim scholars’ body Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind wants plea against 1991 law dismissed

Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind has approached the Supreme Court seeking a dismissal of a plea questioning the validity of the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act—the 1991 law on maintaining the character of religious places as prevailed on August 15, 1947.

The Muslim organisation said the top court’s March 2021 decision to consider the matter could open the door to a flood of cases against countless mosques in the country.

The minority organisation, through its counsel Ejaz Maqbool, sought to implead itself in the petition filed by BJP leader and advocate Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay that “seeks to indirectly target places of worship which are presently of Muslim character”.

Referring to the Ayodhya judgement of a five-judge Constitution bench, Maqbool said the 1991 Act is intrinsically related to the obligations of a secular state. It reflects India’s commitment to the equality of all religions, he said.

“Above all, the Act is an affirmation of the solemn duty which was cast upon the State to preserve and protect the equality of all faiths as an essential constitutional value, a norm which has the status of being a basic feature of the Constitution,” the organisation submitted.

“Historical wrongs cannot be remedied by people taking the law into their own hands. In preserving the character of places of public worship, Parliament has mandated that history and its wrongs shall not be used as instruments to oppress the present and the future,” it said, citing the judgment.

It further said that—even if the petitioner’s allegations are assumed to be true—the plea seeks nothing more than to correct historical wrongs, which is not something that can be done, as held by the Supreme Court in M Siddiq’s (Ayodhya) case.

Upadhyay’s petition questioned the validity of the 1991 law, for its “arbitrary and irrational retrospective cut-off date” of August 15, 1947, for maintaining character of places of worship and pilgrimage against encroachment by “fundamentalist-barbaric invaders and law breakers”.

That petition also contended that under the Hindu Law, a deity and its property is never lost, and devotees have the right to sue a wrongdoer for restoration of deity and its property. So, illegal encroachment by other faiths does not yield any right and equity in favour of the usurper.

On May 20 this year, during the hearing on an appeal against the survey at Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi, the top court had orally said that the 1991 Act does not bar the ascertainment of a religious character. However, there are various nuances of the Act which will fall for consideration.