Gods above the Constitution: A new era for India’s judiciary?

Chief Justice of India's prayers before a deity for a solution to the Babri Masjid–Ram Mandir dispute underlines an awful deficit of constitutional morality, writes S.N. Sahu.

—

IN a rare confession, the Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dr D.Y. Chandrachud disclosed in a recent meeting in his village in Maharashtra that the Ayodhya (Ram Janmabhoomi–Babri Masjid) dispute was adjudicated in the Supreme Court and a solution was arrived at after he sat before a deity and prayed for it.

He said, "Very often we have cases (to adjudicate) but we do not arrive at a solution. Something similar happened during the Ayodhya dispute which was in front of me for three months. I sat before the deity and told him he needed to find a solution."

Demolition of Babri Masjid an "egregious violation of rule of law"

It is worthwhile to recall that the judgment on the above dispute was delivered by a Supreme Court Bench consisting, among others, of the then CJI Ranjan Gogoi and Justice Chandrachud. It sharply described the placement of the idol of Lord Ram inside Babri Masjid as illegal and held that its demolition and "the obliteration of the Islamic structure was an egregious violation of the rule of law".

It also allotted the site of the demolished mosque to those who destroyed it for the purpose of constructing a Ram temple and ordered to provide some five acres of land somewhere else to build a mosque.

Prayer to a deity superseded the Constitution

So the operative part of the judgment that the site of Babri Masjid should be used for building a Ram temple flowed, according to Chandrachud, from a deity whom he prayed for finding a judicial resolution of the Ayodhya (Ram Janmabhoomi–Babri Masjid) dispute.