india

Updated: Jan 09, 2019 00:01 IST

Chief Justice of India (CJI) Ranjan Gogoi on Tuesday set up a new five-member constitution bench headed by him, and comprising justices SA Bobde, NV Ramana, UU Lalit and DY Chandrachud to hear the contentious Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid case on Thursday.

The bench — it includes the present chief Justice of India and, potentially, the next four chief justices of India — will on Thursday decide whether the decades-old title dispute will be heard on a daily basis.

The court was originally supposed to hear the case in October, but after this was deferred to January, several right-wing groups affiliated to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have been demanding a law or executive order to facilitate the building of a Ram temple at the disputed site in Ayodhya. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a recent interview that his government would wait for the courts to rule on the case.

The setting up of a five-judge bench is significant because last year, the Supreme Court rejected the demand of Muslim parties to refer the Ayodhya title dispute to larger bench. That demand came in the context of its own observations in an earlier judgement by five judges in the 1994 Ismail Faruqui case.

In that case, the court held that a mosque is not an essential part of the practice of the religion of Islam and namaz by Muslims can be offered anywhere, even in the open.

Muslim petitioners in the Ram Janmabhoomi case said that the Ayodhya title dispute could not be decided until that judgement was revisited.

A three-judge bench of the Supreme Court in September ruled that the earlier observation was in the context of acquisition of land.

It further stated that “those observations were neither relevant for deciding for suits nor for these appeals”.

The case was then listed before a three-judge bench, which is why the CJI’s decision to constitute a larger bench has taken everyone by surprise.

All parties in the case have welcomed the setting up of the new and larger bench.

Advocate Ejaz Maqbool , appearing for one of the Muslim parties in the case, said, “CJI has an exclusive jurisdiction to refer any matter to a larger bench. This is what we had argued earlier but the former CJI committed a grave error and rejected our demand. Moreover when issues of national ramification like Sabraimala and other cases can be heard by a five- judge bench why should the Babri case not be heard by a similar composition?”

Advocate Vishnu Jain of Hindu Mahasabha, one of the parties to the case, said: “Even though the demand for referring the case to a larger bench was rejected earlier by the Supreme Court, the CJI has the exclusive power to set up benches in important matters. We will argue the matter before the five-judge bench and we are not into bench hunting”.

Constitutional expert and senior advocate Chander Uday Singh welcomed the CJI’s move to set up a larger bench in light of the importance of the case. He said: “Notwithstanding the earlier judicial pronouncements, the CJI’s power to set up benches is absolutely sacrosanct. This is the legal position. The CJI has done the right thing.”

Hoping for an early resolution to the contentious matter , Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) spokesperson Vinod Bansal said : “ (We) Hope the newly constituted five-judge constitutional bench of the Supreme Court headed by the CJI will be able to deliver its verdict on Ram Mandir soon, after day-to -day hearing of the case.”

Fourteen cross-appeals have been filed against the Allahabad high court’s 2010 judgement dividing the 2.77 acre land equally among the three parties – the Sunni Waqf Board, the Nirmohi Akhara and RamLalla, or infant Ram, represented by the Hindu Mahasabha. The matter has been pending before the top court since 2010.