The Supreme Court on Wednesday said a five-judge Bench led by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi is scheduled to hear the Ayodhya title suit appeals on February 26.
The Bench also comprises Justices S.A. Bobde, D.Y. Chandrachud, Ashok Bhushan and S. Abdul Nazeer.
The hearing was deferred on January 29 as Justice Bobde was on medical leave .
The Bench had recently seen a change in two of its judges. Justices Ashok Bhushan and S. Abdul Nazeer had replaced Justices N.V. Ramana and U.U. Lalit. Justice Lalit chose to recuse from the Bench on January 10 after it was pointed out that he had appeared as a lawyer in a case connected to Ayodhya dispute in 1997. Justice Bhushan is the author of the September 27, 2018 majority judgment which refused to refer the question whether prayer in a mosque is essential to Islam before a seven-judge Bench. He was seconded by then Chief Justice Dipak Misra, who had led the three-judge Bench. Justice Nazeer had delivered the dissenting opinion on the three-judge Bench. Justice Nazeer, in a strongly-worded opinion, held that the question was vital to the Ayodhya case and should be answered by a Constitution Bench. On February 26, the Bench is supposed to fix the time and schedule for future hearings in the appeals.
The Bench may also peruse the report prepared by the Supreme Court Registry on the state of the entire case records of the Ayodhya case. These papers have been lying inside 15 sealed trunks in a sealed room of the court for the past several years. The Ayodhya title dispute involves 120 issues which were framed for trial and the case records span the depositions of 88 witnesses running into 13886 pages and 257 documents. Both the depositions and documents are in various languages, including Persian, Sanskrit, Arabic, Gurumukhi, Urdu and Hindi.
Dr. Dhawan said there 533 exhibits in the case, three of which are reports about the disputed site prepared by the Archaeological Survey of India. Lastly, the Allahabad High Court judgment runs into 4304 printed pages. What the Registry reports back would be significant and decide the time-frame for the hearings even as the May Look Sabha elections draws close. The case is a political hot potato with the pressure piling up on the NDA government from several quarters to make good its 2014 electoral promise of a Ram temple on the disputed Ayodhya site.
