THE LEAFLET BULLETIN

Striking down the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991 won’t be an easy task

ON?September 12, the Varanasi district judge?allowed?the maintainability of civil suits filed by five women to offer prayers within Gyanvapi mosque complex. The Gyanvapi mosque-Kashi Vishwanath Temple case is an old and polarising issue in India. The controversy has escalated following a Varanasi civil court-appointed commission’s?videography assessment of the Gyanvapi mosque.

It is an?acknowledged fact?that Mughal emperor Aurangzeb ordered the demolition of the Kashi Vishwanath temple in Mathura in 1669, and the mosque was built on the site. What matters in law, as per the?Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991?(‘Places of Worship Act’) is the status of the Gyanvapi mosque on August 15, 1947.

EWS reservation is a fraud on the Constitution, counsel for petitioners tell the Supreme Court

THE?Supreme Court earlier today began hearing the arguments on?a?batch of petitions?assailing the validity of the?Constitution (One Hundred and Third Amendment) Act, 2019?that provides for a ten per cent quota to economically weaker sections (‘EWS’) of citizens in admission to educational institutions, including private educational institutions. The lead petition is?Janhit Abhiyan versus Union of India.?The petitions are being heard by a five-judge Constitution Bench comprising the Chief Justice of India U.U. Lalit, and Justices Dinesh Maheshwari, S. Ravindra Bhat, Bela Trivedi and J.B. Pardiwala.

Legal scholar and advocate Prof. G. Mohan Gopal mounted?an attack on the validity?of the 103rd Constitutional Amendment, calling it a fraud on the Constitution. He termed the EWS reservations introduced by the amendment as an attack on the constitutional vision of social justice. He added that the amendment has taken out the ‘backwardness’ from the purview of this vision, thus eating up the equality of opportunity, which is the concern of the backward classes.

Stop denying political prisoners the right to healthcare: PUDR

ON?September 10, Deepika Tandon and Shahana Bhattarcharya, Secretaries of the People’s Union for Democratic Rights (‘PUDR’), an independent organisation committed to legally defend civil liberties and democratic rights, in a statement, demanded the provision of proper health facilities and immediate medical attention to jail inmates, the protection of the rights of political prisoners, and the release of all undertrials in the?Bhima Koregaon case, amongst other demands.

On September 8, trade unionist, activist and academic Vernon Gonsalves, one of the 15 undertrials in the Bhima Koregaon case, lodged in the Anda Cell of Taloja Central Jail, was?diagnosed?with dengue and likely pneumonia. Gonsalves, aged 65 years, had been suffering from fever since August 30, but it took an appeal from his lawyer and wife Susan Abraham, and the intervention of a special National Investigation Agency (‘NIA’) court for the Taloja Jail authorities to shift him to the private JJ Hospital for treatment.