India Tomorrow

NEW DELHI, NOVEMBER 17—Over 100 civil society members, including academics, journalists and people from many other professions, have asked for review of the Supreme Court verdict in Ayodhya case, handing over the Babri Masjid site for construction of a Ram temple.  Meanwhile, All India Muslim Personal Law Board(AIMPLB), one of the litigants in the case today announced to file a review petition, rejecting the offer of 5 acres for the Babri Masjid at a different place.

In a joint statement, they said that it was a matter of concern that the apex court in its verdict has asked the Centre to form a trust for building of the Ram Temple as if it was the duty of the government to cater to Hindu religious interests.

“The first source of concern is that the court has delivered a judgment which has been made possible only by the criminal destruction of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992, which the court itself has described as an unlawful act’’, the statement said.

“No speculation over archaeological excavations on the site, on which the court has so much relied, would have been possible without the previous destruction of the Masjid. Nor would it have been as easy for the court to hand over the site to the Hindu side if the Masjid had still stood’’, the statement went on.

The statement further said:

“Moreover, the court’s treatment of both archaeology and history seems to have been rather cavalier and one-sided. There is no iota of proof for the court’s assumption that Muslims had ceased to pray in the Masjid in Mughal and Nawabi times’’.

“Nor is there any proof that Hindus anywhere before very late times believed that Lord Rama was born precisely at the site of the Babri Masjid, which should, of course, not be confused with the belief that he was born in Ayodhya. Remarkably, the court glosses over Tulsidas’s silence on the site of his birth,” the statement points out.

The signatories said: “Finally, the court’s assigning to the government of India the task of setting up a Hindu religious trust to build the future Rama temple on the Babri Masjid site implies that in the court’s view it is the government’s duty to cater to Hindu religious interests. This surely is hardly in consonance with the supposed secular nature of our state. We, the undersigned, therefore, earnestly urge the Supreme Court to review its judgment.”

Prominent among the signatories include

 Achin Vinayak, Anand K Sahay, Antara Dev Sen, Badri Raina, D N Jha, Githa Hariharan, Pamela Philipose, C P Chandrashekhar, Zoya Hasan, Supriya Varma and Prabhat Patnaik .