SC drops Kalyan Singh contempt case

New Delhi: Three decades after the demolition of Babri Masjid and the construction of Lord Ram’s temple in Ayodhya is in full swing, the Supreme Court on Tuesday brought the curtain down on the contempt proceedings against then Uttar Pradesh chief minister Kalyan Singh posthumously and the top officials of the state for their failure to stop the demolition.

Closing the contempt proceedings, a bench comprising Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Abhay S. Oka referred to the November 9, 2019 judgment ruling in favour of the construction of the Lord Ram’s temple and said that you cannot keep flogging a dead horse.

“Nothing survives in the matter now,” since a larger bench of the Supreme Court has already delivered a judgment on the Ayodhya matter, the court said.

“You can’t keep flogging a dead horse. We are only making an attempt to take up old matters. Some may survive, some may go. The larger issue has already been decided by a five-judge bench. “The petitioner has died; the contempt petition against the respondents is closed,” the court said, burying the contempt petition.

Besides Mr Singh, who passed away on August 21, 2021, other BJP leaders who got relief include former Union ministers Murli Manohar Joshi, Uma Bharti and Sadhvi Ritambhara.

The court today also turned down the lawyer M.M. Kashyap’s plea to substitute the petitioner Mohammed Aslam alias Bhure, who passed away in 2010, with an amicus curiae.

As per the record of the daily orders of the top court relating to the contempt petition, the contempt petition filed in 1992 was listed only on two occasions — November 29, 2001 and April 23, 2010.