On Monday, the Supreme Court cast doubt on the haste of the Uttar Pradesh government to enact the Shri Banke Bihari Ji Temple Trust Ordinance, 2025, which would enable the state to take charge of the holy temple in Vrindavan, Mathura. A bench led by Justice Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi said that it was in an “unseemly hurry and secrecy.”
The bench especially welcomed the matter of how the state went about the process of getting the court to allow it the use of the funds belonging to the temple in developing a corridor project–via civil conflict. The court noted that there was a certain sense of secrecy with which the Uttar Pradesh government obtained its approval through its judgment of May 15, which casts a major suspicion on procedural foundations.
As a reaction, the Supreme court has suggested remanding the orders given in the May 15 decision, which offered the government access to temple money. It also advised the constituting an independent committee who can be a retired High Court judge to run the affairs of the temple till the time the issue of the validity of the Ordinance will be decided by the High Court.
The bench agreed to put the matter on hold till Tuesday, August 5 and ordered that the parties can be challenging the Ordinance in the High Court. In the meantime, the temple will continue to be under the interim committee that shall also consist of the district collector, all the individuals concerned with the stakeholders, and perhaps the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) too.
Senior Advocate Shyam Divan, who had argued on behalf of the former management of the temple said that the Ordinance amounts to eviction of the Goswamis, the hereditary caretakers of the temple. According to him, the act is a demeaning of conventional curatorship interfering with established religious practices. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court ruled that temple rituals will be maintained in the interim period through the management of the existing priestly family.
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