Listen to this article:

A pattern of litigation is now running across at least six contested religious sites in three states. It is doing to the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991, what neither parliament nor the Supreme Court has been willing to do. The Act is not being amended. It is not being struck down. It is being made unavailable to those it was written to protect, one site at a time, through a different doctrinal route each time.

The Bhojshala verdict delivered on Friday (May 15) by the Indore Bench of the Madhya Pradesh high court is the latest expression of this pattern. It is also the most ambitious. The Bench comprised Justices Vijay Kumar Shukla and Alok Awasthi. It has held the 1991 Act inapplicable to Bhojshala. The ground is that the site is a centrally protected monument under a different statute. The route the Bench has used was not, until now, available. The verdict adds a sixth procedural pathway to a map that already had five.

As the Hindustan Times has reported, litigation similar to Bhojshala is now alive in courts from Uttar Pradesh through Karnataka. The geographic spread is itself the analytical fact. What follows is the spread, read against the Act it is dismantling.

The Act and the wager

The 1991 Act was parliament’s reply to the demolition cycle of the late 1980s. Under it, the religious character of every place of worship in the country was frozen as of August 15, 1947. Any change in that character was prohibited. The Ayodhya Bench of 2019 treated the Act as a basic feature of the secular constitutional order, immune to ordinary legislative revision. The wager was simple. The past would be set beyond the reach of judicial inquiry. Civil peace in the present was the price exchanged for that quiet.

That wager is no longer being honoured. The six sites that follow show why.

At Varanasi, the route opened in 2021. In August that year, five Hindu women filed a suit at a civil court. They sought permission to worship at the Maa Shringar Gauri site within the Gyanvapi mosque complex. A civil court ordered a video survey of the complex in May 2022. The Allahabad high court has since held that the 1991 Act does not bar the suit. The doctrinal route opened at Gyanvapi is the procedural one. The 1991 Act, the courts hold, only bars conversion. It does not bar a suit that seeks to ascertain what the site’s religious character was on August 15, 1947.........

© The Wire