Paradoxical though this may sound, but the Supreme Court verdict turning down the plea to send the 1994 Ismail Faruqui case to a larger Constitutional Bench, may eventually eliminate extraneous matters which have complicated what is quintessentially a civil dispute and force future hearings to the core issue. This is the same case where the apex court made the sweeping assertion that "a mosque is not an essential part of the practice of the religion of Islam".
From a fundamental question of ownership or title of the disputed structure (or the land), all sorts of faith related questions have been added to complicate an already byzantine legal maze. The return to the title suit now pending for almost seven decades, which will be heard from October 29 by a newly constituted bench, marks new hope for arriving at a judgement aimed at settling the original dispute.
The first majority judgement, pronounced by three of the five judge bench, concluded that in Islam a place of worship is not central or of vital import as namaz "can be offered anywhere, even in open", without as much as either detailed examination of Islamic scriptures or the query being central to the case. The dissenting verdict of Justice S Abdul Nazeer now provides several reasons why the issue of essentiality and centrality of a mosque in Islam must be heard by a larger bench. If the Supreme Court, too, follows the path which the Allahabad High Court chose when it pronounced the populist judgement on September 30, 2010, faith of people will be severely eroded in the judiciary. [ . . . ]
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