Police officers in front of the Gyanvapi mosque, in Benares, January 31, 2024. NIHARIKA KULKARNI / AFP The effect was expected and feared since the decision of the Supreme Court, in 2019, to grant Hindus the right to build a temple on the ruins of the Babur mosque in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, destroyed two decades earlier by them. Since this historic judgment, a wave of appeals has spread in India to try to recover Muslim places of worship, claiming that they were built on Hindu sites during the period of the Mughal sovereigns who reigned from 1526 until the arrival of the British in 1857. The Supreme Court opened Pandora’s box. This movement has grown to such an extent that the chief justice, Sanjiv Khanna, decided on December 12 to prohibit civil courts from registering any new trial or issuing orders in pending cases seeking the inspection of mosques to see if there are temple structures underneath. A total of ten cases are pending before the courts. This decision came after an outbreak of violence around the Jama Masjid mosque, one of the oldest in India, in the town of Sambhal, in Uttar Pradesh. Hindu petitioners approached the local court claiming that the 16th century mosque was built on the site of a temple destroyed by the ruler Babur (1526-1530), founder of the Mughal dynasty who built three large mosques, in Ayodhya, Panipat and Sambhal. For them, the mosque is a Hindu holy place. You have 76.12% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
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