Ram Janmabhoomi judgment: Courts bound to accept community's beliefs, not judge them, TDB tells Supreme Court

NEW DELHI: Citing the Ram Janmabhoomi judgment endorsing Hindus' belief that the disputed site at Ayodhya was Lord Ram's birthplace, Travancore Devaswom Board on Wednesday told Supreme Court that an individual's fundamental right must give way to centuries-old beliefs and the faith of a religious denomination.

Almost in sync with solicitor general Tushar Mehta's submissions on behalf of the Centre, senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi told a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices M M Sundresh, B V Nagarathna, Ahsanuddin Amanullah, Aravind Kumar, A G Masih, P B Varale, R Mahadevan and Joymalya Bagchi that the judicial test of the validity of a custom had to be confined to 'public order, health and morality'.

"The beliefs and practices of the community have to be judged by the subjective belief of the community. The court is bound to accept the belief of the community, and it is not for the court to sit in judgment on that belief," he said. An individual's fundamental rights under Article 25 of the Constitution to profess, practice and propagate a religion of his/her choice, could not be allowed to extend to an area which intruded upon the collective rights of adherents of that religion, he said.

Singhvi cautioned against selective judicial interpretation of religious texts and quoted from the 2019 Ram Janmabhoomi judgment, in which a five-judge bench led by then CJI Ranjan Gogoi had unanimously ruled, "We must firmly reject any attempt to lead the court to interpret religious doctrine in an absolute and extreme form and question the faith of worshippers. Nothing would be as destructive of the values underlying Article 25 of the Constitution."
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