Title Suit Vs Forgotten Crime

The long dispute over the Ayodhya land may soon see legal closure, but not the Bari Masjid demolition case.

- Puneet Nicholas Yadav

For the past three weeks now, a five-judge Constitution bench of the Supreme Court has been assembling on every working day to hear submissions by lawyers appearing in the Babri masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi title suit. Led by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, the bench has to decide which of the parties in the decades-old case has a valid claim over the 2.77 acres of disputed land in Ayodhya. With Gogoi retiring on November 17, the buzz is that the country’s most politically and communally sensitive case may finally see closure in the months ahead.

Some 550 km away, in the Old High Court complex of Lucknow, another trial is on. This one seeks to fix the culpability of “lakhs of kar sevaks”—a majority of them still unidentified—who participated in the demolition of the Babri masjid on December 6, 1992. The trial in Lucknow is also to determine if BJP leaders L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Uma Bharti and several other members of Sangh Parivar outfits such as the RSS, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal were guilty of a criminal conspiracy that culminated with the demolition of the mosque. The ominous task of disposing of these cases lies with Special Judge S.K. Yadav, who has been presiding over the trial since April 2017.