The Shaheedganj Mosque dispute from the Lahore of the 1930s shows us that claims drive by faith are best handled by enforcing rule of law
First published on Scroll.in
22 years ago to this day, frenzied mobs set upon the Babri
Masjid and tore it down. The incident set off massive riots, the largest the
subcontinent has seen since Partition. In
Mumbai alone, around 1,000 people are said to be have been massacred.
Today, matters have cooled down. The BJP, which used the
agitation to rise exponentially, now holds an absolute majority in Parliament.
The legal dispute itself is over. In 2010, the Allahabad High Court passed a judgment
splitting the land 3 ways. And while the BJP is yet to deliver on its promise
of building a “grand” ram temple, the spot where the Babri Masjid once stood
does function as a Hindu place of worship.
Interestingly, Lahore in the 1930s saw a remarkably similar dispute.
While in the 1990s, Hindu politicians claimed that a mosque stood over what was
once a temple, in Lahore of the 1930s, Muslim politicians claimed that a gurdwara stood over what was once a
mosque. It was, to use AG Noorani’s words,
“Ayodhya in reverse”. However, as we shall see, the final outcomes of the two
cases were rather different.
The Dispute
A year after the British occupied the Punjab in 1849, a
Lahori citizen named Nur Ahmad filed a case against Bhai Jiwan Singh and Ganda
Singh, who held possession of the Shaheedganj Mosque. This mosque had been in
control of a group of Sikhs for at least two and a half centuries now and in
the same compound there also existed a gurdwara.
The suit was dismissed since Ahmad did not have possession of the structure—the
expected legal outcome. Ahmad was not deterred and filed at least 3 more cases
but all of them fell through. At around the same time, in the 19th
century, a very similar legal process was actually followed in the case of the chabutra, or platform, outside the Babri Masjid. Hindu groups
sued for ownership of the chabutra
but lost on grounds of not having possession (claims to the Babri Masjid
structure itself, would be made later)
Back to Lahore: in 1927, the Shaheedganj Mosque was formally
passed into the care of the newly formed Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak
Committee (SGPC). Immediately, there were objections from Muslim groups and
after a protracted series of legal cases, the Lahore High Court ruled in favour
of the SGPC on the grounds that the mosque had long since ceased being used for
Muslim worship and had passed into Sikh hands since at least 1852. To compare,
the Babri Masjid site had been in Muslim hands since at least 1528, a time
period more than 300 years longer than Shaheedganj.
Soon after winning the case, the SGPC decided to the clear
the compound of all “un-Sikh like deviations and non-Sikh usages”. On the night
of July 8, 1935, the Sikhs in control of the compound demolished the mosque,
placing Lahore on communal tenterhooks. Just like in 1992, the majority
community, fired by religious fervour, wanted control over a place of worship
that they had no legal claim to.
By October, 1935 we were seeing a familiar pattern: Muslims
had started a programme of civil disobedience, trying to take the property by
force. By October 1935, Lahore had seen Sikh-Muslim riots over the issue.
How it was resolved
Here, however, things start to diverge from Babri. Unlike in
Uttar Pradesh, Lahore’s colonial administration was extremely strict with protestors. It opened fire on agitating Muslim crowds when
they tried to take the compound by force and wantonly arrested leaders of the
agitation, at one time even barging into the city’s biggest mosque, the Badhshahi
Masjid to apprehend Maula Bakhsh and Yasub-ul-Hasan, the main leaders of the
civil disobedience at the time.
One more difference was that the movement was confined to minor
politicians—unlike the BJP in independent India, the big wigs of the time never
took up the case of Shaheedganj. At the time, the premier of the Punjab was
Fazl-i-Husain, who led a pro-British, cross-communal party of landlords, called
the Unionists. This sort of grassroots communal agitation was harmful for the
Unionists, who had within them Muslim, Hindu as well as Sikh zamindars. Fazl-i-Husain, therefore,
quite explicitly advised Muslims to give up claims to Shaheedganj. He writes in
his diary:
Various people came to me about the Shahidganj Mosque. I advised them to drop the matter, and then something may transpire to improve matters, but that there was no advance possible at this stage. They protested that this meant defeat. I told them that they have been defeated in this matter at all stages and my advice is to court no more defeats.
Herbert Emerson, then Governor of the Punjab, invited Jinnah
over to Lahore to further calm matters. Jinnah was largely a non-entity in
Punjab at the time but the Muslim League did have some influence over the urban
population of Lahore who were the main party in this case.
Khalid Guaba, a local Punjabi politician who chaperoned
Jinnah around, has left us a humorous portrait
of the visit. On being asked to go to the Friday prayers at the Badshahi Mosque,
Jinnah initially refused. As it turned out, Jinnah did not know how to read the
namaaz. Gauba claims he gave Jinnah
“a few lesson as to the posture he had to make” while praying, however at the
mosque, unable to physically go down on his knees, Jinnah simply squatted down
on the floor of the mosque with “his knees and hands folded”.
This aside, Jinnah’s visit proved successful. He set up a
peace board with representatives of all communities. During a speech, Jinnah lamented that
nowadays there were no cross-community leaders and recalled his mentor from
Bombay, saying, “Give me more Gokhales”. BR Nanda writes that
Jinnah was successful
in “securing the revocation of civil disobedience by Muslim firebrands, and
lowering the communal temperature.”
Shorn of political oxygen, the movement for the Shaheedganj
Mosque collapsed. Soon enough, the SGPC constructed a gurdwara at the site of
the now demolished Shaheedganj Mosque.
The legal side of the issue dragged on till 1940 when the
case was discussed in the Privy Council—the court of ultimate appeal in British
India. Unlike the Allahabad High Court in 2010, however, the Privy Council did
not get bogged down with medieval history or religious belief in order to
decide what was essentially a property dispute. In line with lower court judgements,
it simply dismissed the Muslim side’s claim, citing the statute of limitations,
noting that the property has been under Sikh control for a sufficient length of
time.
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