New Delhi: From the “uncrowned king of political interest litigation”, and a retired Army officer who has sought a ban on lawmakers taking up other professions while in office, to Subramanian Swamy, politician-cum-serial litigant—these are among a number of people who have filed petitions before the Supreme Court challenging key provisions of the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991.
On Thursday, a bench led by Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna directed all courts across the country to refrain from passing interim or final orders on pleas disputing the character of existing places of worship till the next date of hearing or until further orders since the case concerning the challenge to the Places of Worship (PoW) Act is pending consideration before the top court.
Challenge to the 1991 PoW Act
Introduced amid the Ayodhya Ram Mandir movement, the 1991 Act was brought in to prohibit the conversion of any place of worship and keep its religious character “as it extended on the 15th day of August 1947”. However, the law exempts the Ayodhya dispute and extends to all of India, barring Jammu and Kashmir.
Among the first, a plea filed by advocate Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay challenging Sections 3 and 4 of the act has been pending before the court since 2020.
The plea seeks to declare these provisions as unconstitutional and void ab initio (from the very beginning) on grounds that they violate the right(s) to equality; not to be discriminated against on grounds of race, religion, sex, caste or birthplace, to life, and; to freedom of religion, among others.
Section 3 prohibits the conversion of a religious place of worship or a section of a religious place of worship into a place of worship of a different religion or a different denomination of the same religion, while Section 4 bars the filing of any suits or initiation of any other legal proceedings for converting the religious character of a place of worship as it existed on August 15, 1947.
In his plea, Upadhyay essentially argues that the 1991 Act deprives the petitioners of the right to restore their “places of worship and pilgrimages” that were destroyed by invaders.
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Advocates Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay & others
Advocate and BJP leader Ashwini Upadhyay, who mainly practices in the Supreme Court and has been involved in matters that have attracted significant public scrutiny, such as the Anna Hazare anti-corruption movement in 2011.
In 2018, ThePrint reported that Upadhyay has also been dubbed “the uncrowned king of political interest litigation” as is evidenced by his frequent filing of public interest litigation petitions (PILs) before the country’s courts, primarily the SC and the Delhi High Court.
He told ThePrint that he had a “passion for filing PILs” and had filed 35 cases in the apex court and another 15 in the Delhi HC as of September 2018.
Upadhyay has filed PILs on granting minority status to Hindus, altering the names of sites named after Mughal emperors, and making Yoga compulsory for school students between the ages of 6-14 years.
Delhi-based lawyer Chandra Shekhar and engineer-turned-lawyer Rudra Vikram Singh are other advocates who have challenged the 1991 Act.
Chandra Shekhar has previously represented Delhi Lieutenant Governor V.K. Saxena in the Medha Patkar defamation case. In the case, which was before the Saket court in October, this year, Patekr had challenged her sentencing and conviction in a defamation case filed against her by Saxena 24 years ago, when he was the chair of an Ahmedabad-based NGO. Before this, Patkar had filed a case against Saxena saying that he published certain defamatory advertisements against her.
According to Singh’s LinkedIn profile, he has been serving as the counsel for the Adani Group since April this year. Before this, he served as a selection committee member at the University Grants Commission (UGC) for a little over two years.
Although Singh has a 7-year-long legal career and has been practising before the Supreme Court since 2018, he holds a BTech degree from the Uttar Pradesh Technical University.
In July, this year, he filed a petition in the Delhi HC seeking to set up a high-level committee to investigate the deaths of three UPSC aspirants in Delhi’s Rajender Nagar due to heavy rainfall and waterlogging in the basement of a coaching centre.
Subramanian Swamy
Among other petitioners is Subramanian Swamy, the founder and leader of the Virat Hindustan Sangam (VHS)—a right-wing Indian organisation that, according to its listed objectives, seeks to “pave the way for a Hindu Renaissance based on the concepts of Sanatana Dharma”.
In recent years, Swamy, who was a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and served on the party’s national executive committee till October 2021, has emerged as its biggest critic.
A former Rajya Sabha MP, Swamy was also the president of the Janata Party till it merged with the BJP in 2013 and served as a member of the Planning Commission of India.
Among other key petitions he has filed before the Supreme Court are the pleas seeking a court-monitored probe into the alleged use of animal fat in Tirupati laddus and demanding an investigation into the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs).
A retired army officer
Petitioner Anil Kabotra is a retired army officer based in Haryana and his challenge to the Act dates back to a petition he filed nearly two years ago in 2022.
Separately, in 2019, Lt Col (retd) Kabotra filed a petition before the Supreme Court seeking the issuance of broad guidelines to ban lawmakers from taking up any other profession while in office.
On X, Lt Col (retd) Kabotra identifies as a “life member of yoga guru and entrepreneur Baba Ramdev’s Bharat Swabhiman Trust and says he appreciates Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “honest efficient efforts” for the good of “Bharat”.
MLA Chintamani Malviya
An MLA from the town of Alot, which falls in the Ratlam district of Madhya Pradesh, Dr Chintamani Malviya is also one of the petitioners in this case.
He has also served as a Member of Parliament (MP) from Ujjain. His official X account says that he is also the state’s BJP vice-president.
Spiritual leader Devkinandan Thakur
A petition challenging the PoW Act by spiritual leader and religious preacher, Devkinandan Thakur, who hails from Mathura, also dates back to 2022.
Last year, in May, a local court in Agra had issued notices to the Uttar Pradesh Central Waqf Board and other stakeholders after allowing a plea by Shri Krishna Janmabhoomi Sanrakshit Seva Trust to recover the idol of Lord Keshavdev, which the Trust claimed was buried under the steps of Jama Masjid mosque in Agra.
The development came weeks after Thakur said at a ‘Bhagwat Katha’ in Agra that idols of Lord Keshavdev must be returned to Hindus. “Thakur is also the patron of the Shri Krishna Janmabhoomi Sanrakshit Seva Trust,” ThePrint reported at the time.
Nearly two years ago, in June, Thakur filed a plea in the top court challenging a provision of the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) Act while seeking directions to lay down guidelines for identifying minorities.
“Followers of Judaism, Bahaism and Hinduism are being deprived of their basic rights to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice. On the other hand, Muslims are in the majority in Lakshadweep (96.58 percent) and Kashmir (96 percent) and there is a significant population in Ladakh (44 percent), Assam (34.20 percent), Bengal (27.5 percent), Kerala (26.60 percent), UP (19.30 percent) and Bihar (18 percent) and (they) can establish and administer educational institutions of their choice,” the plea said.
In another 2022 plea filed before the top court, he had sought to control the population in the country and asked the Centre to come up with directions for framing rules, regulations, and guidelines to control the population and, possibly, come up with two-child criteria for recruitment in government jobs, subsidies, and other initiatives.
“125 crore Indians have Aadhaar Card while around 20 percent i.e. 25 crore citizens are without Aadhaar, and around 5 crore Bangladeshi and Rohingya infiltrators, illegally residing in India. From this, it is evident that the total population of India is more than 150 crore and India has marched ahead of China,” the plea argued.
Maharaja Kumari Krishna Priya
The daughter of Kashi Naresh Vibhuti Narayan Singh, the royal family head of Kashi, Uttar Pradesh, Maharaja Kumari Krishna Priya also filed an intervention application in the main plea challenging the Act nearly 2 years ago.
Calling the Act a “textbook instance of a legislation that was passed in the most undemocratic of manners possible”, she had argued that the law was passed without any regard for the fundamental rights of affected parties, such as the previously-colonised indigenous communities seeking reclamation of “occupied” religious sites, according to LiveLaw.
She added that as the titular head of the erstwhile royal family of Kashi, she was the head patron of the temples. The plea also said that the princess had locus to approach the court since she was a representative of the said family.
Swami Jitendranand Saraswati
Religious seer Swami Jitendranand Saraswati is the secretary general of the Akhil Bharatiya Sant Samiti, a top body of Hindu seers and religious leaders.
Nearly two years ago, the body passed a resolution demanding a “Sanatan Censor Board” to address the “anti-Hindu narrative” being shown in Bollywood movies. It stemmed from objections over the 2023 mythological movie Adipurush, starring Prabhas and Saif Ali Khan, which was inspired by Hindu epic, Ramayana.
In June, last year, the seer launched the “Know Your Temple” initiative, at the inauguration of which he cited an old report of the World Gold Council from 2015 to claim that India’s temples hold 22,000 tonnes of gold, which amounts to 1 trillion dollars.
Subsequently, in September 2023, his organisation set up a four-day Sanskriti Sansad, which was scheduled in November, that year, where remarks of DMK leader Udhayanidhi Stalin against “Sanatana Dharma” were to be discussed.
“Seers and religious scholars from different parts of the country will converge in Varanasi in November to deliberate on the alleged ‘conspiracy’ against Sanatan-Hindu culture and other issues,” the PTI reported at the time.
The conclave’s agenda also said that participants would discuss topics like “external and internal conspiracy against Sanatana Hindu culture, temple-centred system of Sanatana Hindu religion, mockery of history, illegal control of governments over Hindu temples, women and youth”.
(Edited by Sanya Mathur)
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