Gyanvapi and the fight for Places of Worship

This month, a court in Varanasi upheld the maintainability of a case filed by five Hindu women, demanding the right to pray and access to the Gyanvapi mosque. The mosque authorities are challenging the case in Supreme Court because they feel that this please will open a pandora's box and is essentially against the Places of Worship Act of 1991. The fight between Hindu and Muslim parties at Gyanvapi began exactly two years after the Supreme Court allowed the building of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya in 2019. In this week's podcast, we speak to one of the five Hindu petitioners, Manju Vyas about how the case started. Manju says it's when she realized that she could only visit the Shringar Gauri deity inside the mosque once a year. ''We all met while visiting the Shringar Gauri temple. It used to open up once every year. I was not sure about the exact place where I could get a ‘darshan’. I saw others praying at the outer premises. I was confused and started gathering information. I discussed this issue with other women. All temples in the nation are opened yearlong and deities are offered ‘bhog’ but people could only pray here from outside," she told HT The Places of Worship Act passed during Narasimha Rao's tenure in 1991 had made it very clear that Ayodhya was an exception and all other religious sites would stick to the same position they had at the time of independence. As the 2019 Ayodhya judgement said, "History and its wrongs shall not be used as instruments to oppress the present and the future,” Lawyers like Shadaan Farasat, who have tracked the case closely, believe that the Gyanvapi case may encourage other groups to challenge the status quo-"I do feel that the Ayodhya judgment has given a lot of energy and force to entities and groups who wanted to pursue such actions. Although the Ayodhya judgment and the Babri judgment itself recognise that this is clearly a one-off and for other matters, the Places of Worship Act protects and prevents such actions, but clearly that seems to have not happened. When the matter itself went to the Supreme Court, at that stage it was not fully stopped by the Supreme Court itself in the Gyanvapi case, lying on its own judgment. I think given all of that, the parties definitely feel that there are opportunities to initiate these kinds of disputes and pursue them." So what does the ongoing litigation mean for each of the parties and for us? Join Sunetra Choudhury as she explores this with all the stakeholders.