Supreme Court of India
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday granted two more weeks time for the Centre to respond on a batch of petitions challenging the provisions of the Places of Worship (Special Provision) Act.
The Supreme Court asked the Centre to file the affidavit by 31 October and posted the matter for hearing on 14 November.
The Supreme Court had on 9 September granted two weeks’ time to the Centre to file its reply on pleas challenging the validity of certain provisions of the 1991 law.
A three-judge bench headed by Chief justice Uday Umesh Lalit permitted all the applications, including the plea filed by Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, to intervene in the hearing of the pleas on the validity of the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991.
The bench, also comprising Justices S Ravindra Bhat and P S Narasimha, had ordered that the matters be heard by a three-judge bench on 11 October and asked the parties to complete the pleadings by then.
The 1991 law prohibit the filing of a lawsuit to reclaim a place of worship or seek a change in its character from what prevailed on August 15, 1947.
On March 12 last year, The top court had sought the Centre’s response to one of the pleas filed by lawyer Ashwini Upadhyay challenging the validity of certain provisions of the law which provides maintaining the status quo with regard to ownership and the character of religious places as prevailing on 15 August, 1947.
The petition alleged that the 1991 law creates an “arbitrary and irrational retrospective cut-off date” of 15 August, 1947 for maintaining the character of the places of worship or pilgrimage against encroachment done by “fundamentalist-barbaric invaders and law-breakers”.
With inputs from agencies
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