India’s top court blocks lawsuits against places of worship amid petitions for mosques

The Supreme Court in India has today blocked lower trial courts from registering any new lawsuits against places of worship until they get further orders from the senior court. The directions came as the Supreme Court hears petitions challenging the Places of Worship Act, 1991, which prohibits the conversion of any place of worship. It also provides “for the maintenance of the religious character of any place of worship as it existed on the 15th day of August, 1947.”

In pending cases, the courts would refrain from any “effective interim or final order” until further orders, according to a bench comprising Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Justices Sanjay Kumar and K. V. Viswanathan.

“We are examining the vires, contours and the ambit of [the] 1991 Act,” said the bench, reported the Press Trust of India news agency. The court asked the central government to file its reply to the pleas in four weeks.

The senior court’s order has come amid Hindu groups filing back-to-back petitions in the courts claiming prominent mosques were built on the site of former temples in the recent past. A local court recently accepted a petition to survey a famous 13th-century shrine of a Muslim saint in Ajmer in western Rajasthan state.

Earlier, a court ordered a survey of the Shahi Jama Masjid in the town of Sambhal in northern Uttar Pradesh in response to a petition claiming that a temple once stood on the mosque site. While the survey was underway, it triggered clashes in the area in which at least five people were killed and several police officers were injured. The Supreme Court, however, halted the court’s proceedings on the matter.

A Hindu group has recently demanded a survey of the iconic Jama Masjid, the main mosque in New Delhi, alleging that statues of Hindu deities are buried within the mosque.

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