Sambhal vs Sanjauli: A tale of two court orders (2025)

Rashme Sehgal

Published: 01 Dec 2024, 10:10 AM

How far will a court judgement go in triggering a riot?

The recent example of an order passed by a civil judge Aditya Singh in Sambhal on 19 November 2024 should be illustrative.

Singh was hearing a petition filed by Hindutva cheerleaders, who demanded they be allowed to conduct a survey of the Shahi Jama Masjid, an ASI-protected monument, which they claimed was built in the 16th century by the Mughal emperor Babar after pulling down a Shiv temple.

The petition was filed on the afternoon of 19 November. Without even hearing a representation from the Muslim side, the judge passed an order that the survey be carried out by an advocate commissioner that very same evening.

This was done without any ado.

A court decision even before the other party has been heard is a first. No coincidence that voting was due the next day (20 November) for nine assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh, after the completion of the first stage of the survey.

Nobody is surprised any more by the metronomic consistency of these communal dog whistles, and Yogi Adityanath has been a mascot and flagbearer of the tradition; but a court decision that doesn’t even bother with the pretence of a fair hearing is a new low in our public life.

The ‘survey’ could obviously not be completed by the evening of 19 November, and so the surveyors returned to the Sambhal Jama Masjid on 24 November (a day after the UP assembly results had been declared). There, members of the Muslim community, upset that the court had not even heard their side, had gathered in large numbers.

Clashes broke out between the protestors and the police, leading to the death of five Muslim youth.

Contrast this with the judgement by a division bench of acting chief justice Manoj Kumar Tewari and justice Rakesh Thapliyal of the Nainital High Court, who in response to a demand to demolish a 55-year-old mosque built on private property in Uttarkashi ordered the state government and the DGP police to maintain peace and security ‘at all costs as also ensure no harm came to the mosque’.

The petition to demolish the mosque was filed by the Alpsankhyak Seva Samiti and came up in court on 22 November. While reading out the order, one of the judges is reported to have said: “We are not living in a theocratic state” and need to show respect for all religions.

The Nainital two-judge bench has shown that courts can be a restraining influence if they insist the administration maintain law and order.

Himachal Pradesh proves that if the police are unencumbered by political interference, they can and do act firmly to ensure communal harmony. Sanjauli is an example.

In Sambhal, the police are recorded on video throwing stones at the protestors. The five recorded deaths include a 22-year-old whose father alleges he was shot in the chest by the police.

Uttarakhand chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami has clearly done a close reading of Yogi’s handbook on how to whip up a communal frenzy.

On Dhami’s watch, the state of Uttarakhand has become militant Hindutva’s preferred laboratory. From amping up the communal rhetoric at will to bulldozing mosques, madrasas and Muslim homes (remember Haldwani in January 2023?) to menacing and hounding Muslims out of their homes and small businesses (Purola, June 2023) to passing a blatantly un-uniform Uniform Civil Code (February 2024)... it has many dubious distinctions in the Hindu right-wing’s anti-Muslim sweepstakes.

The arsenal was used to telling effect in the recent Kedarnath bypoll, which the BJP’s Asha Nautiyal won, after the party had faced humiliating defeats in Ayodhya/Faizabad in the Lok Sabha election (June 2024) and the Badrinath bypoll (July 2024).

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The Uttarkashi district administration had already conducted an enquiry in September and found that the mosque in question was a legal entity, having been built in 1969 on private land.

Funds for its construction were raised through individual donations and the mosque has been registered with the Waqf Board.

But these details were of no consequence and held no meaning for the Hindutva hordes that took out a procession on 24 October, threatening to pull down the mosque. They knew full well that the state was an ally, even as they clashed with the police — an incident in which both protestors and policemen were injured, and eight were arrested for inciting violence.

Uttarkashi district BJP chief Satinder Rana met chief minister Dhami to complain against police ‘high-handedness’. Dhami obligingly ordered a re-examination of the land acquisition papers to see if any ‘illegality’ had occurred.

Those arrested were released on bail.

The DSP and the SDM Uttarkashi, who had both taken a tough stand against the pulling down of the masjid, were packed off by Dhami to state headquarters in Dehradun.

Hindutva groups led by the VHP also threatened to hold a mahapanchayat in Uttarakashi on 1 December. Afraid that this may trigger more violence, the respondents sought an urgent hearing before the Nainital High Court on 27 November, which refused permission for the mahapanchayat and instructed the police to ensure no untoward incident took place in Uttarakashi.

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The problem goes back to the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and the Supreme Court verdict of November 2019, in which a five-judge bench headed by then-CJI Ranjan Gogoi and including the just-retired CJI D.Y. Chandrachud, invoked specious logic to finally clear the way for a Ram Mandir to come up at the disputed Ram Janmabhoomi–Babri Masjid site.

The verdict made good use of the explicit exception provided in the Places of Worship Act, 1991, in the following words: ‘Nothing contained in this Act shall apply to the place or place of worship commonly known as Ram Janmabhumi–Babri Masjid situated in Ayodhya in the State of Uttar Pradesh’.

But the Act came into being with a purpose — to prevent a repeat of this cycle of contesting claims about an old place of worship and its predictable aftermath. It opens with the statement: ‘An Act to prohibit conversion of any place of worship and to provide for the maintenance of the religious character of any place of worship as it existed on the 15th day of August, 1947.’

It happened, nevertheless.

The floodgates opened for contesting claims — Gyanvapi, Mathura, Sambhal, Ajmer Sharif et al — when recently retired chief justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud put his stamp of approval on the Gyanvapi ‘survey’, arguing that curiosity about the ‘true nature’ of the structure did not violate the Places of Worship Act.

Chandrachud also refused to stop the puja being conducted in the southern cellar of the Gyanvapi mosque complex.

The judgement emboldened Hindu groups clamouring for the demolition of 2,000-odd mosques, which they claim were built by Muslim rulers after destroying Hindu temples. The sites targeted include the Red Fort, the Delhi Jama Masjid and the Taj Mahal.

Litigants have already filed cases pertaining to these claims in various courts, including one demanding the demolition of the Shahi Idgah in Mathura for a ‘vistaar’ (expansion) of the Krishna Janmabhoomi temple along the lines of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya.

Vishnu Shankar Jain, the advocate representing Hindu litigants in Varanasi and Mathura, insists this is a battle for the restoration of Hindu heritage. What it is, though, is an attempt by a fundamentalist revisionist regime to obliterate Islamic religious and sacred spaces—if our judiciary will let them have their way.