Ayodhya

[Guest]

[url="http://www.dailypioneer.com/286952/Muslim-pleaded-for-Nirmohi-Akhara-in-1959.html"]Muslim pleaded for Nirmohi Akhara in 1959[/url]

October 01, 2010 5:04:24 AM

Biswajeet Banerjee | Lucknow

The verdict of the Lucknow Bench of Allahabad High Court has brought cheers among the sants of Nirmohi Akhara, who were among the first to file title suit in the Faizabad court, almost 50 years ago.



“We respect court order. Justice has been done to us,” Mahant of the Nirmohi Akhara Bhaskar Das told The Pioneer.



Though he is very eloquent about getting possession of the one-third of the disputed land, he is circumspect over sharing land with the Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas, which has also been given the ownership of one-third land, including the place where Ram Lalla exists. “I cannot say now what we will do. We have to discuss the matter with the sants of our sect and then only I can tell whether we would join hands with Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas,” he said.



Nirmohi Akhara and Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas have long been at loggerheads. The Nirmohi Akhara does not like the VHP-dominated Nyas and had opposed them.



Bhaskar Das, the Mahant of Nirmohi Akhara, was the man who had filed the first petition seeking ownership rights of the land in Ayodhya where Hindus claim a mosque was built on a Ram Temple. It was 1959 when Bhaskar Das, in his early 30s, filed the case on behalf of Mahant Raghunath Das, who was heading the Trust Panth Mahanandi Nirmohi Akhara at that time.



“I was young at that time and the Maharaj ji (Mahant of the Trust) had entrusted me the job of getting the petition filed. Every day I used to travel to Faizabad court and sit with the advocate for hours and watch the petition being typed meticulously,” Das told this reporter as he reminisces the time when the first petition was filed.



He said: “You know who filed the petition on our behalf for the first time? He was a Muslim, one Siddiqui sahib.”



Nirmohi Akhara is a religious denomination following its own religious faith and customs and is one of the 14 akharas recognised by the Akhil Bharatiya Akhara Parishad. The akhara belongs to the Vaishnav sampradaya.



Nirmohi Akhara filed a suit in January 1885 with the sub-judge of Faizabad, seeking consent to construct a temple for Lord Ram in the area called the Ram Chabutra, adjacent to the Babri mosque. The sub-judge held then that two large religious structures in close proximity could potentially be a threat to public order. Permission was denied by the court, though the Nirmohi Akhara has since kept up its effort to reclaim the land and construct the temple.



Why Nirmohi Akhara filed this petition? “In 1949 when Government locked the gates of the temple after idols of Lord Ram appeared there mysteriously, we petitioned the local administration to give us the ownership right because revenue records of the land were in the name of Nirmohi Akhara since 1940. When we did not get any response from the administration, we decided to move the court in 1959,” the Mahant of the Nirmohi Akhara said.