Justice RF Nariman urges enforcement of Places of Worship Act, cautions against temple-mosque conversion suits-OxBig News Network

Cautioning against filing of suits seeking to convert mosques and dargahs into temples creating communal disharmony, former Supreme Court judge RF Nariman has called for enforcement of the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991 to check such attempts.

“We find today, like hydra-heads popping up all over the country, there is suit after suit filed all over the place, not only concerning mosques, but also dargahs. The only way of countering this — because all this can lead to communal tension and disharmony, contrary to what is envisaged both in our Constitution and the Places of Worship Act — by applying the (Ayodhya) judgment which upheld the Act,” Justice Nariman said last evening.

He was delivering the inaugural lecture of Ahmadi Foundation on ‘Secularism and the Indian Constitution’. Ahmadi Foundation has been set up in the memory of former CJI AM Ahmadi, who passed away in March last year.

Special CBI judge Surendra Yadav, who acquitted all the accused, including former deputy PM LK Advani, former UP CM Kalyan Singh and senior BJP leaders Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharti in the Ayodhya demolition case in 2020, got a post-retirement job as Deputy Lokayukta in Uttar Pradesh, Nariman said. “This is the state of affairs in this country,” he said.

While terming the Supreme Court’s 2019 Ayodhya verdict as a travesty of justice as secularism was not given its due, he, however, said five pages of the judgment affirming the Places of Worship Act of 1991 were a silver lining.

Noting that the Supreme Court specifically upheld the Act and declared it to be a fulfilment of secularism — a basic feature of the Constitution, Justice Nariman said the verdict should be read in every district court and high court to prevent suits against mosques and dargahs.

Enacted by the Parliament during the PV Narasimha Rao government, the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991 freezes the religious character of a place of worship as it existed on August 15, 1947.

The Section 3 of the Act prohibits conversion of a place of worship or a section of a place of worship into a place of worship of a different religion or a different denomination of the same religion.

According to Section 4(2) of the Act, all appeals, suits or other proceedings with respect to converting the religious character of a place of worship shall end on the commencement of the Act. Also, fresh appeals won’t be allowed to be filed.

However, legal proceedings could be initiated if the change of religious character of the place of worship was done after the cut-off date of August 15, 1947.