The Gyanvapi mosque management committee on Thursday failed to secure an urgent hearing in the Supreme Court for challenging the Varanasi district court’s order that allowed Hindus to offer prayers at the southern cellar of the mosque. The legal team representing the committee was instead asked to approach the Allahabad high court.
“At around 7 am today, the registrar concerned called up to inform that the Hon’ble Chief Justice of India has asked us to move the Allahabad high court,” advocate Fuzail Ahmad Ayyubi told HT.
Ayyubi added that an urgent hearing was sought to enable the committee to get some time to assail a challenge to the order passed by the Varanasi district magistrate on Wednesday. “A letter of extreme urgency was filed, and we approached the concerned registrar at 2 am on Thursday, to place our request before the hon’ble CJI,” the lawyer said.
Read here: Gyanvapi mosque committee asks Muslims to keep their shops closed on Friday
The letter questioned the alleged “hot haste” shown by the Varanasi district administration to swing in action and make arrangements for Hindus to offer prayers in the southern cellar of the mosque.
{{/usCountry}}The letter questioned the alleged “hot haste” shown by the Varanasi district administration to swing in action and make arrangements for Hindus to offer prayers in the southern cellar of the mosque.
{{/usCountry}}“Even before the petitioner managing committee could take steps for challenging the order dated January 31, 2024, before the Hon’ble High Court of Judicature at Allahabad, the district administration has commenced cutting across the iron barricading in the middle of the night with arrangements to conduct a puja at the southern side of the mosque by early morning,” stated the plea.
Prayers commenced at the southern cellar around 3am on Thursday.
The committee said that the local administration’s actions were in contravention of the orders passed by the Supreme Court in May 2002 which directed for an unhindered right for the Muslims to offer namaz inside the mosque precincts.
“There is no reason for the administration to undertake this task in hot haste in the dead of the night as the order passed by the trial court had already given them one week to make the necessary arrangements. The obvious reason for such unseemly haste is that the administration, in collusion with the plaintiffs, is trying to foreclose any attempt by the mosque managing committee to avail of their remedies against the said order by presenting them with a fait accompli,” added the letter of urgency.
On Wednesday, district judge AK Vishvesha granted the family of a late priest the right to resume prayers in the southern cellar of the mosque after three decades, saying that the petitioner Shailendra Kumar Pathak Vyas and a priest appointed by the Kashi Vishwanath trust, which manages the temple next door, will be allowed to enter the premises.
Prayers — which were last offered in December 1993 — will have to resume within the next seven days, added the judge, whose last working day was Wednesday.
The order, which was in less than week after a report of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) said that a large Hindu temple existed before the construction of the Gyanvapi Masjid, marked yet another decisive turn in the decades-old dispute that will have reverberations not only on a raft of linked suits over the shrine but also in similar petitions over a mosque in Mathura.
Varanasi, Mathura and Ayodhya are part of a decades-old ideological project by Hindu groups who argue that medieval-era Islamic structures were built by demolishing temples and demand rights over those structures.