The CBI on Monday submitted objections on the maintainability of a criminal appeal filed in the high court in Lucknow against the acquittal of all 32 accused, including former deputy prime minister L K Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharti, in the Babri mosque demolition case. A bench of justices Ramesh Sinha and Renu Agrawal of the Allahabad High Court fixed September 26 for the next hearing on the appeal of Haji Mahboob Ahmad and Syed Akhlaq Ahmad.
When the matter came up before the Lucknow bench on Monday, CBI counsel Shiv P Shukla and government advocate Vimal Kumar Srivastava raised objections regarding the maintainability of the appeal. They contended that the appellants were not the victims in the case and hence did not have the right to file the present appeal against the acquittal of the accused.
Earlier, the appellants had filed a revision petition against the acquittal but Justice Dinesh Kumar Singh had held that it was not maintainable under Section 372 of CrPC, which deals with the provision of appeals in criminal cases. On request of the petitioners, the court had directed its office to convert and treat it as a criminal appeal.
Accordingly, the criminal revision was converted into a criminal appeal and listed before the appropriate division bench. The appellants said that they were witnesses in the trial and were victims owing to the demolition of the disputed structure.
The Babri mosque was demolished by Karsewaks on December 6, 1992. After a long legal battle, the special CBI court on September 30, 2020 pronounced the judgment in the criminal trial and acquitted all the accused.
The trial judge had refused to believe newspaper cuttings, video clips as evidence as the originals of the same were not produced , while the entire edifice of the case rested on these pieces of documentary evidence. The trial judge also held that the CBI could not produce any evidence that the accused had a meeting of mind with Karsewaks who demolished the structure.
Assailing the findings of the trial court, the appellants have pleaded that the trial court committed an error in not convicting the accused despite ample evidence being on record. The trial judge did not appreciate the evidence of conspiracy in the right perspective, they said.
In the petition, the appellants have urged the high court to set aside the judgment of September 30, 2020 and hold all the 32 accused guilty.
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