Places of Worship Act: Supreme Court gives Centre more time to respond

The apex court was hearing a clutch of petitions challenging the Act on the grounds, among others, that it bars judicial review, a basic feature of the Constitution as held by the SC in its 1980 judgment in “Minerva Mills Ltd. & Ors vs Union Of India & Ors”.

In the Minerva Mills judgment, the SC had said that “the power of the judicial review is an integral part of our constitutional system and without it there will be no government of laws, and the rule of law would become a teasing illusion and a promise of unreality”.

The judgement further read: “If there is one feature of our Constitution which, more than any other, is basic and fundamental to the maintenance of democracy and the rule of law, it is the power of judicial review and it is unquestionably a part of the basic structure of the Constitution.”

The SC notice to the Centre had come on a plea filed by Advocate Ashwini Upadhyay on March 12, 2021, before the top court clubbed several petitions challenging the Act.

In June 2020, a Lucknow-based trust, Vishwa Bhadra Pujari Purohit Mahasangh, had moved the SC challenging the Act. A few days later, the Jamiat Ulema-I-Hind, too, approached the court seeking permission to be made a party in the matter. The Jamiat had told the court that “even issuance of notice in the…matter will create fear in the minds of the Muslim Community with regard to their places of worship, especially in the aftermath of the Ayodhya dispute and will destroy the secular fabric of the nation”.