The Supreme Court (SC) has done well to reject a spate of applications seeking to intervene in the Ayodhya dispute because the chief purpose of these applicants had been to delay a decision on the issue through the introduction of various legal complexities. In any case, none of these interventionists had any direct stake in the disputed land which is being claimed by three groups who were also parties when the Allahabad High Court had adjudicated on the issue years ago. The three organisations had been dissatisfied with the ruling, which is why the matter reached the apex court.
At least some of the others who tried to meddle are people with suspect credentials — activist Teesta Setalvad, for instance. Since the SC has held that it would be dealing with the case as one purely that of a land dispute, the role of any person or group of persons other than those who claim the land as theirs, stands rejected. We must hope that the removal of cobwebs will help hasten an early legal resolution to the problem.
One of the applicants whose plea was rejected was senior BJP leader Subramanian Swamy, but he still remains in the fray in another courtroom of the apex judiciary based on a petition he has filed seeking his right as a Hindu to pray where his faith says Lord Ram was born. Swamy has invoked his Fundamental Right which, he says, has primacy over ‘ordinary rights’ — which the claim over the property is. It will be interesting to watch how that side game pans out and how it would impact the main case being heard by a three-judge bench headed by the Chief Justice of India.
But while the bench has begun hearing the arguments, there is some talk that the case may be referred to a larger, five-judge bench. The lawyer representing one of the original plaintiffs has argued that an earlier five-judge bench had in an unrelated case ruled that Muslims did not need a mosque to pray, and as long as that ruling stood it would prejudice the matter against the Muslim litigants.
Meanwhile, there is nothing to stop private efforts at an out-of-court settlement. The present bench has rightly stated that it would neither endorse nor restrain such efforts and that if an agreement came around, it would take the development into account. At the end of it all, one can only hope or an early resolution, since the delay of decades has not just complicated the issue, but also became a cause of communal tension across the country.
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