The Allahabad High Court on Monday allowed the Uttar Pradesh government and the CBI to file their objections to the maintainability of a criminal appeal against the acquittal of all 32 accused, including BJP stalwarts L K Advani and M M Joshi, in the Babri mosque demolition case, and fixed September 5 as the next date of hearing.
A bench of Justices Ramesh Sinha and Saroj Yadav passed the order. During the hearing in the Lucknow bench of the high court on Monday, CBI counsel S P Shukla and government advocate Vimal Kumar Srivastava raised a preliminary objection regarding the maintainability of the appeal on the ground that the appellants were not victims of the case, hence, they did not have any right to challenge the acquittal of the accused persons.
Ayodhya residents Haji Mahmood Ahmad and Syed Akhlaq Ahmad had filed a revision petition against the acquittal, but Justice Dinesh Kumar Singh had held last month that it was not maintainable and directed that it be treated as a criminal appeal.
Accordingly, the revision petition was converted into a criminal appeal and listed before the appropriate division bench. The two petitioners have alleged that they were witnesses in the trial against the accused and that they were also the victims of the violence.
The Babri mosque was demolished by karsevaks on December 6, 1992. After a long legal battle, a special CBI court on September 30, 2020 pronounced the judgment in the criminal trial and acquitted all the accused, including Advani, Joshi, former UP chief minister Kalyan Singh, senior BJP leaders Uma Bharti and Vinay Katiyar, Sadhvi Ritambhara and Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh.
The trial judge had refused to believe newspaper cuttings, video clips as evidence as the originals of the same were not produced, while the entire edifice of the case rested on these pieces of documentary evidence. The trial judge also had held that the CBI could not produce any evidence that the accused had a meeting of mind with karsevaks who demolished the structure.
Assailing the findings of the trial court, the petitioners had pleaded that the court committed error in not convicting the accused as ample evidence was on record. “The trial judge did not appreciate the evidence of conspiracy in the right perspective,” the petitioners claimed.
The petition sought setting aside of the judgment of September 30, 2020.
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