Lucknow: A woman has surfaced claiming that the five-acre land given to build the mosque, as per the Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhoomi case verdict, belongs to her family. The woman was identified as Rani Punjabi, a native of Delhi. She said that she would approach the Supreme Court to establish the claim to the land.
As per the 2019 Supreme Court verdict in the Babri Masjid case, the government allotted five acres of land in Dhanipur village of Ayodhya to the Sunni Central Waqf Board to build a mosque. Rani Punjabi claims that this land is a part of her family's 28.35 acres and has all the documents proving her claim.
However, the head of the Indo-Islamic Cultural Foundation Trust, Zufar Faruqi, said that Rani Punjabi's claim is false and the Allahabad High Court had already rejected it. He added that the construction of the mosque will start in October.
A five-judge bench of the Supreme Court, which heard the nearly dispute after the Babri Masjid was demolished by Kar Sevaks on December 6th, 1992, decided that the mosque was built on an ancient structure which is not whose architecture was distinctly Indigenous and non-Islamic. Though the court concluded that there was no evidence to assert that the ancient structure was specifically demolished to build the mosque, it ordered the government to hand over the land to the Hindu trust so that they could build a temple. The court also asked the government to allot an alternative 5-acre land for a new mosque to be built.