Supreme Court to hear plea over Allahabad HC’s 2017 direction to evict mosque on its premises on February 9

Acting on a Public Interest Litigation (PIL), the high court had on November 8, 2017, said, “The Waqf, shall hand over vacant and peaceful possession of the site in dispute to respondent no 1 — the High Court — within a period of three months…” from the date of the judgment.

The high court order made a note of the “acute crunch of space” it was facing.

Referring to the need to complete the construction of the high court’s administrative annexe without further delay, it said, “Recently, 19 additional Judges have been sworn in, but because of shortage of space, as many as 12 of them are sharing six chambers. The High Court could not arrange and allot them separate chambers. On one or two occasions, when the Division Benches, on Friday, had to split and judges were required to sit singly, one judge had to sit in chamber and conduct hearing of the matters assigned to him.”

Hearing it again in February 2018, a Supreme Court bench, comprising the then Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra and Justice A M Khanwilkar and then justice D Y Chandrachud, called for an amicable solution and asked the parties to discuss among themselves to arrive at a settlement, if possible.

Justice Chandrachud had said then that there were several tracts of land beside the high court and some part of this could be considered for relocating the mosque. Then CJI Misra, too, seemed to favour a relocation.

On the next date of hearing on April 2, 2018, the high court told the Supreme Court it does not have alternate land to relocate the mosque. The Supreme Court then sought the views of the state government.