A view of the Supreme Court of India in New Delhi. | Photo credit: Shashi Shekhar Kashyap
A bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta dismissed a plea filed by Devki Nandan Pandey, a petitioner personally from Uttar Pradesh, seeking blanket judicial restraint on naming mosques after Babur or using the nomenclature ‘Babri Masjid’.
Mr. Pandey had made the Union government and the states respondents in the petition. He called Babur an “intruder”.
Recently, while laying the foundation of a mosque in West Bengal’s Murshidabad, suspended TMC MLA Humayun Kabir had said that naming a mosque after the Mughal emperor was not unconstitutional.
The Babri Masjid, a 16th century mosque in Ayodhya, was demolished by kar sevaks on December 6, 1992. It had been a site of communal tensions and protracted legal battles for decades, including a property dispute with the Hindus over ownership of the land on which the mosque had stood.
In 2019, a five-judge bench headed by the then Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi had declared that the land belonged to the Hindus.
The Ramjanmabhoomi title dispute judgment in November 2019 had further directed the Center to allot five hectares to the Sunni Waqf Board for construction of a new mosque at a prominent place.
Published – Feb 20, 2026 12:14 PM IST
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