New Delhi: The Supreme Court, on Monday has spelled out clearly that Senior BJP leader L K Advani and other BJP veterans facing charges in decades-old Babri Mosque demolition case will have to undergo trial.
With this, the Court’s order on March 22 will reveal whether 89-year-old L K Advani and other BJP leaders like Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharathi will be on trial for conspiracy or not. The charges of conspiracy was dropped by the lower courts and the CBI had challenged the Allahabad High Court order in May 2010 confirming the lower court’s decision to drop conspiracy charges against the BJP veterans.
“We will not accept the discharge of Advani and others on technical grounds. We will allow you (CBI) to file a supplementary chargesheet against 13 persons by including the conspiracy charges. We will ask the trial court to conduct a joint trial,” the court told CBI.
Advani’s lawyer had strongly opposed this and told the court that if conspiracy charges are added, then 183 witnesses who had deposed at the lower court in Raebareli in 1992 would have to be called again.
Advani and a dozen others including Vinay Katiyar and Kalyan Singh were released by a court in Raebareli of conspiracy charges in the razing of the 16th century Babri mosque in Ayodhya in December 1992 by Hindu activists who believed it was built on the birthplace of Lord Ram.
