The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) is set to place a new signboard outside the controversial Shahi Jama Masjid in Uttar Pradesh’s Sambhal town that says that the mosque’s name is ‘Juma Masjid’ and that the structure is a protected monument. The new board has been placed inside the new Satyavrat police outpost adjacent to the mosque. An ASI team will replace the existing board, which bears the name Shahi Jama Masjid on a green background, with the new board with the name on a blue background. “During the arguments in the Allahabad High Court regarding a petition for whitewashing the mosque before Ramzan recently, a debate arose in court regarding the mosque’s original name,” an official at the ASI unit in Meerut’s Shastri Nagar locality said. “A 1927 agreement between the Government of India and the mosque committee refers to it as Juma Masjid, and the structure is referred to as the same in ASI records. We are just calling the structure by its original name…no one should have any objection,” the official added. Five people were killed in the violence that broke out in Sambhal on November 24 last year after a court-ordered survey of the Shahi Jama Masjid. The survey was ordered after a priest and six others filed a civil suit claiming that a temple once stood at the site of the mosque. The police have arrested 79 accused, including Zafar Ali, the president of the Shahi Jama Masjid managing committee.
