December 6, Ambedkar Smriti Din, is significant in Indian history for one more reason. It was on another December 6 – in 1992 – that the Babri Masjid was demolished. Former president and the then-vice president Dr K.R. Narayanan has described this as the greatest tragedy India faced after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.
The event has inflicted deep wounds on the psyche of Indian Muslims, who had reposed their faith in constitutional values and institutions.
As suggested by Dr Ambedkar in his speech in the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949, equality, liberty and fraternity cannot be divorced from each other.
“Without equality, liberty would produce the supremacy of the few over the many. Equality without liberty would kill individual initiative. Without fraternity, liberty and equality could not become a natural course of things. It would require a constable to enforce them,” Dr Ambedkar said.
The Babri demolition is a crime, but not one of the accused could be punished by the trial court after a prolonged trial.
The title case as to who owns the property at Ayodhya/Babri resulted in the Supreme Court verdict of November 9, 2019. While holding that pleas of title and adverse possession cannot be advanced simultaneously and from the same date, the Supreme Court ruled against the claim of the masjid.
It was directed that a suitable plot of land measuring five acres shall be handed over to the Sunni Central Waqf Board for construction of a mosque.
Ghazala Wahab, the author of Born a Muslim, has articulated in an article that the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid issue was never a land dispute, and if it was indeed a land dispute, then the litigating Muslims “should have accepted alternative land/monetary compensation in lieu of the mosque before its mauling”.
“By accepting land in lieu of justice, Muslims have sanctified their secondary status as a community that does not need justice,” Wahab said.
The Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991 preserves the religious character of every place of worship as it existed on August 15, 1947, with an exception available only to the Babri Masjid/Ram Mandir.
The Supreme Court in the Ayodhya case held that the said law protects and secures the fundamental values of the constitution and that “non-retrogression is a foundational feature of the fundamental constitutional principles of which secularism is a core component”. Like many other legal scholars, former Union law minister Salman Khurshid has hailed this part of the judgment.
The doctrine of ‘non-retrogression’ means that “the state should not take measures or steps that deliberately lead to retrogression on the enjoyment of rights either under the constitution or otherwise”.
A quietus to all the ongoing or future litigations on account of the disputed nature of a place of worship would have been good for the fraternity of all Indians.
However, when the Gyanvapi case was taken up for consideration, the Supreme Court permitted the litigation to continue at the Varanasi district court. The court orally observed that the question as to “what [the] status of the place of worship [was] as on August 15, 1947” can be examined by the court.
The Krishna Janmabhoomi at Mathura is also the subject of litigation, despite the non-retrogression suggested by the Supreme Court.
None less than the prime minister of India laid the foundation stone for the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya on August 5, 2020. And recently in a speech, the PM mentioned the Krishna Janmabhoomi at Mathura.
Read with these the inauguration of the new parliament building with religious prayers on the 140th birthday of V.D. Savarkar, the ideological proponent of the Hindu rashtra, on May 28, 2023.
Secularism is a basic feature of the Indian constitution, and these are but part of several attempts to thwart that basic feature.
India is awaiting only a formal declaration as a Hindu rashtra, according to eminent scholar Tarunabh Khaitan.
Equality of opportunity and status; liberty of thought, expression and belief; and fraternity among people belonging to different communities are not possible if the state privileges one faith over another.
The non-retrogression of places of worship is both a legal mandate and our fraternal obligation. What better day to remember it than December 6?
(Prashant Padmanabhan is a Supreme Court advocate. Safiya Muhammed is a social activist. Courtesy: The Wire.)
