Siddhivinayak wall illegal, must go: HC
The Bombay High Court on Thursday held that the wall around the famous Siddhivinayak Temple here - built for security purposes - was illegal and it would have to be demolished.
By Agencies |
MUMBAI: The Bombay High Court on Thursday held that the wall around the famous Siddhivinayak Temple here — built for security purposes — was illegal and it would have to be demolished.
The temple management has, however, got time up to November 30 to move the Supreme Court against the ruling. If the apex court does not grant a stay, the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) will have to pull down the wall after November 30, the High Court said.
The order by a division bench of Justices RM Lodha and SA Bobde came even after the state advocate general Ravi Kadam conceded that neither the Bombay Police Act nor the Mumbai Municipal Corporation Act allows construction of a wall encroaching on public roads.
In the present case, the wall around the temple, built last year, blocks the Kakasaheb Gadgil and SK Bole roads and partially encroaches upon Veer Savarkar road.
Residents of the surrounding area, led by one Vinod Desai, had filed a PIL demanding that wall be removed. According to MCGM, it had granted the Siddhivinayak Temple Trust only a “temporary permission” up to October 31, ’06 for the wall, after that it was supposed to be removed.
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The High Court, after going through various laws related to development in Mumbai, concluded that notwithstanding the threat perception to the temple — which attracts lakhs of devotees every year — construction of such a wall “suffered from illegality.” At the last hearing, the state government had told the court that though the wall was supposed to be temporary, police department itself had recommended to the civic body that it should be allowed to stand, considering the threat perception of the famous shrine.
The police recommendation came in view of the ’02 terrorist attack on Akshardham Temple in Gujarat and last year’s attack on Sankatmochan Temple in Varanasi.
However, the court had then queried which law permitted construction of wall on a part of the public road. If the wall was an encroachment from legal point of view, it would have to go, the court had said, which was reasserted by today’s order.
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“Under the veil of security, police should not have asked for construction of a wall on public road,” the court noted. The court clrified that the trustees as well as the police were at free to take any other steps for preventing terrorist attack.The court also added that if the MCGM eventually pulls the wall down, the temple trust will have to bear the cost. The trust, incidentally, has spent around Rs 6 crore for construction of the wall.
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