An aerial view shows Gyanvapi Mosque, left, and Kashi Vishwanath Temple on the banks of the Ganges river in Varanasi, India [File: Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP]
Metropolis Desk-
A 17th-century mosque in India’s north may have been constructed over a Hindu temple, according to a court’s decision, which permits officials to perform a scientific investigation to find out.
Right-wing Hindu organizations assert that several mosques in the state of Uttar Pradesh were constructed on top of Hindu temples that were allegedly destroyed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, during the height of Mughal rule, including the Gyanvapi Mosque in Varanasi, a district that Prime Minister Narendra Modi represents in parliament.
The debate over the mosque, which is next to the Kashi Vishwanath Temple, a well-known Hindu shrine in India with an 80% Hindu population, has grown in recent years. Nearly 14 percent of the 1.4 billion inhabitants in the country are Muslims.
The state-run Archaeological examine of India was permitted to examine the building without causing any damage, according to Vishnu Shankar Jain, an attorney for the Hindu petitioners, who was speaking on behalf of them before the Allahabad High Court in Uttar Pradesh on Thursday.
Chief Justice Pritinker Diwaker was quoted as saying, “Scientific survey is necessary in the interest of justice,” by Live Law, an online source for Indian legal news.
The survey was opposed by the Muslim petitioners because they believed it would harm the building.
The mosque committee has the right to appeal Thursday’s judgment in India’s Supreme Court, according to Muslim petitioner Khalid Rasheed.
Rasheed told reporters, “We are hoping that justice will be served because the mosque is 600 years old and Muslims have prayed there for a very long time.
The survey was started by the Archeological Survey of India last month, but the Supreme Court paused it to allow time for an appeal.
Five Hindu women had previously asked a court for permission to do Hindu rituals in a particular area of the mosque, claiming a Hindu temple once stood there.
A dispute erupted over a building that the Hindu petitioners believed to be a shivling, a representation of the Hindu god Shiva. Muslims claimed it was a component of a fountain in the wuzukhana, a small water source used by followers of Islam to perform ritual cleansings before praying.
The Anjuman Intezamia Masjid Committee, a Muslim organization that oversees the Gyanvapi Mosque, claims that the survey violates the terms of a 1991 Indian law that protects houses of worship.
It is against the law to change the religious nature of any place of worship, except the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, according to the legislation.
Hindu hardliners claimed that the Babri Masjid mosque, built in the sixteenth century in the Uttar Pradesh temple town of Ayodhya, stood on the precise location where Lord Ram was born, and they destroyed it in 1992.
Around 2,000 people lost their lives in major religious riots that broke out across India as a result of the demolition. 2019 saw a decision by India’s Supreme Court in favor of a Hindu temple on the contentious religious site and an order to offer Muslims another land so they may construct a mosque.
Since the 1940s, Hindu nationalists in Ayodhya have pushed for the construction of a temple there. A Hindu trust is now constructing a temple there with the support of Modi’s right-wing administration.
The temple’s foundation stone was placed by Modi himself in 2020, and it is anticipated that it would be dedicated before the upcoming national elections in May of 2021.
Source- Al Jazeera
