The mosque as juristic person: law, public order and inter-religious disputes in India

Abstract

The dispute between Muslims and Sikhs over the Shahidganj mosque in Lahore in the early 1930s served as the prelude to the Punjabi Muslims’ decisive shift in favour of the Pakistan movement. The competing political campaigns, religious polarization and intermittent spells of violence that it triggered has attracted the attention of historians interested in the development of communitarian mass politics and partition. However, the dispute also played out in the colonial courts and became the site on which some of the knottiest questions of colonial jurisprudence were debated. The present essay looks at this ignored aspect of the Shahidganj conflict. Could the mosque, like a Hindu deity, be designated a juristic person? What laws would apply in an inter-religious dispute of this nature? And whether in such matters, the state law enjoyed pre-eminence over religious laws. Despite the unanimity over the building’s antecedents as a mosque, the courts–all the way from the Sikh tribunal, to the High Court to the Privy Council–ruled in favour of the Sikhs. The essay seeks to understand how these competing claims were adjudicated and what were the imperatives of the colonial government that resulted in such a judicial outcome. It then proceeds to examine the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid case in order to understand the continuities as well as departures in the exigencies of the post-colonial state, and the resolutions it offered thereof in such disputes.