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Supreme Court open to Ayodhya hearing from July 25 if mediation complete
The Chief Justice of India in his order on Thursday said that the Supreme Court would wait for a report to decide if the mediation in the Ayodhya land dispute case was completed.
The Supreme Court on Thurday sought a report within a week on the court-supervised mediation in the Ramjanmabhoomi-Babri Masjid land dispute matter after the litigants differed on the progress made in the case.
Nirmohi Akhara, one of the litigants in the land dispute case who had earlier supported mediation, said that talks were not going well and was unlikely to bear positive result. “No one from the Sunni Wakf Board has met us,” they told the Supreme Court. Muslim parties, on the other hand that the mediation was on and the application was an ‘attempt to intimidate them’.
The Chief Justice in his order on Thursday said that the court would wait for the panel report to decide if the mediation was completed. If so, then the hearing would start from July 25. And if the court feels the mediation is not making headway, “the matter will be heard on day-to-day basis.”
The Supreme Court had agreed to examine an application filed by an original petitioner in the Ramjanmabhoomi-Babri Masjid land dispute matter, who claimed the mediation proceedings as ordered by the court have made no headway.
The application, filed by Rajendra Singh, survivor of Gopal Singh Visharad, was mentioned before a bench led by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi, which said it would look into the request.
Visharad was the first to approach the court in 1950 for a declaration that he “is entitled to worship without any obstruction according to the rights and tenets of his religion at the birthplace of Lord Shri Ram Chandra.” It was his petition that triggered the civil dispute. Visharad had sought a permanent prohibitory injunction against the removal of Lord Ram’s idols situated at the disputed side.
The three-member mediation panel is led by former SC judge, Justice FMI Kalifulla; spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and senior advocate Sriram Panchu are its members. Panchu is a pioneer in alternative dispute resolution mechanism. The committee has held several rounds of mediation with stakeholders in Faizabad district.
On May 10, the court granted the mediation committee time till August 15 to give its report on the efforts made to resolve the long-pending title dispute. This was done after the panel filed an interim report on before the constitution bench led by the CJI.
“Despite initial reluctance in the process of mediation, the applicant herein wholeheartedly participated in the mediation proceedings conducted by the three eminent persons appointed by the court. However, in the three meetings participated during a period of five months, neither any concrete proposal has come from anyone nor any headway is likely to be made in the process of mediation,” Visharad’s application read.
SC referred the dispute for mediation on March 8 and had fixed an eight-week deadline for the submission of a progress report.
