SC bench not to hear plea on Ayodhya verdict delay

In a further twist to the run-up to the Ayodhya judgment, the presiding judge of a Supreme Court bench, Justice Altmas Kabir, said he had no “determination” to hear a petition seeking postponement of the judgment by the Allahabad High Court.

With the judgment scheduled to be pronounced by a three-judge Bench of the Lucknow Bench of the high court on Friday, there was hectic activity in the Supreme Court to get the decision postponed to enable a last-minute settlement between the parties to the suit for the title of the land on which the Babri Masjid stood before its demolition in 1992.

The petition, filed by Ramesh Chand Tripathi, a retired bureaucrat, was presented in the morning before the Bench consisting of Justices Kabir and A K Patnaik. They asked Tripathi’s lawyer to mention it in the afternoon. When the Bench assembled in the afternoon, 15 minutes late, Justice Kabir surprised the crowded court by announcing his disinclination to hear the case.

When senior counsel Mukul Rohtagi submitted that tomorrow might be too late, Justice Kabir expressed his helplessness in the matter and repeated his decision to recuse from the case.

Since the Chief Justice, who decides the Bench formation of judges, is sitting on the constitution bench this week, the matter is likely to go to him for further direction. The next act in the drama will take place on Thursday morning, just a day before the scheduled delivery of the judgment in the 60-year-old dispute.

Last week, Tripathi had approached the high court with the same prayer, but it was rejected by a majority of 2:1. It also imposed “exemplary cost” of Rs 50,000 on Tripathi, calling his prayer for an out-of-court settlement as “mischievous”. This sparked off a controversy with the dissenting judge, Justice Dharam Veer Sharma, alleging he was not consulted by his brother judges on the Bench, Justice S U Khan and Justice Sudhir Agarwal, while dismissing Tripathi’s petition.