The Delhi High Court has asked a man to pay a ₹1 lakh penalty for making Lord Hanuman his co-litigant in a plea on the dispute of a temple built on private land.
“I never thought that God would, one day, be a litigant before me. This appears, however, thankfully, to be a case of divinity by proxy,” said Justice C. Hari Shankar in the 51-page judgment delivered on Monday.
The court, after rejecting 31-year-old Ankit Mishra’s petition, ordered him to pay the ₹1 lakh fine to Suraj Malik, the owner of the property in question.
The plea had challenged an order of a lower court in Delhi which had held that the temple was situated on purely private land belonging to Mr. Malik. The court had held that if a person were to construct a temple on the private land occupied by him, he could not be said to have become disentitled from the possession of the land merely because of the presence of the temple on it.
The lower court had also said that although the public was permitted to offer worship on festive occasions, that fact would not convert a private temple into a public one.
Mr. Mishra had challenged the lower court’s order, stating that Mr. Malik’s property should be “handed over”, since it had acquired the status of a “public temple”, wherein the owner loses all right over the land.
He further stated that he had been offering prayers at the temple, which is located in Uttam Nagar, for a “long time”, and had a “deep religious belief” attached to the temple and its deities.
Calling it a case of “rank collusion with an intent to grab” the property, Justice Shankar dismissed the petition and ruled that Mr. Mishra had acted in “contumacious collusion” with the current possessors of the land so as to stop the owner from regaining possession.
It added that mere worship by the public at a private temple does not convert it into a public temple as it would lead to disastrous consequences, which no civilised system of law could countenance.
“As has happened in the present case, a person could grab the property of another, squat thereon, construct a temple on the property, allow the public to occasionally worship there, and obstruct, permanently, the restoration of the property to its rightful owner. Allowing such a pernicious practice would be driving the last nail in the coffin of justice,” it said.
