On Friday, the Supreme Court refused to stay the Allahabad High Court’s order allowing a survey to be conducted at the Shahi Idgah mosque in Mathura, Uttar Pradesh to examine whether the mosque is built on a temple. This paves the way for the survey to be conducted.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court had greenlit a similar survey to be carried out at the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi by refusing to interfere in the Allahabad High Court’s order permitting the same. The survey was subsequently carried out by the Archaeological Survey of India.
The challenges to the survey exercises mounted by the mosque management committees in both cases were based on the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991. This law specifically prohibits any changes to the religious character of a place of worship in independent India.
The constitutionality of this statute was challenged before the Supreme Court through petitions that have been pending since 2020. However, the pendency of these petitions, combined with the apex court’s refusal to deal with the challenge to the survey orders based on the statute, has allowed the Hindu side to effectively bypass the law in both the Varanasi and Mathura matters.
An examination of the journey of the challenge to the 1991 act in the Supreme Court by Scroll reveals that almost no progress has been made in the case in the last three years. This has been on account of the failure of the Union government to file a response to the challenge without any push back from the court. Experts feel this delay emboldens lower courts to bypass the law.
A similar pattern is conspicuous in the Gyanvapi mosque survey challenge before the Supreme Court, where the court has remained sitting on the question of the suits being barred by the 1991 act without resolving it even as the survey ended up being carried out.
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here .