Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath on Saturday claimed that he knew right from the beginning that the efforts for mediation in the Ayodhya land title dispute will fail, NDTV reported.
“Honourable Supreme Court had constituted a three-member team for mediation, it was unsuccessful,” he said at a meeting of religious leaders in Ayodhya. “We already knew mediation would lead to nothing. But it is good that attempts were made. Mediation attempts had been made before Mahabharat too, but they had failed.”
The comments came a day after the Supreme Court said it will hear the Ayodhya land dispute from August 6 after the mediation panel it had set up in March to resolve the case failed in its objective. The panel – led by retired Supreme Court judge FMI Kalifulla, and comprising spiritual leader Ravi Shankar and senior advocate Sriram Panchu – had submitted its report to the court in a sealed cover on Thursday. A five-judge Constitution bench comprising Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justices SA Bobde, DY Chandrachud, Ashok Bhushan and S Abdul Nazeer said the hearing would be held on a daily basis.
The dispute has been going on for several decades, with both Hindu and Muslim groups claiming their right to the land. The Babri Masjid stood there before it was demolished in 1992 by Hindutva activists. In 2010, the Allahabad High Court had ordered the land to be divided in three equal parts between the Nirmohi Akhara, the Sunni Wakf Board and the representative for the deity Ram. The top court will hear appeals against this verdict.
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