Why wait for the verdict?

Let’s wait. No, said the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad Supreme Court. A retired bureaucrat, Ramesh Chand Tripathi, filed a petition challenging this.
It gets even more bizarre:

The Court fixed September 28 as next date of hearing, keeping in mind that one of the judges would be retiring on the 30th of this month.

So, instead of a week, it is five days because a judge is to retire? Can’t his retirement be deferred? What if a judge falls ill or something worse happens?

It has now become an issue about disagreement among judges about whether the verdict should be delayed rather than the verdict. What is Tripathi’s motive?

In the petition filed through advocate Sunil Jain, he cited several reasons for deferment of the verdict, which he said would be in "public interest" in view of the apprehension of communal flare up, upcoming Commonwealth Games, elections in Bihar and violence in Kashmir Valley and Naxal-hit states.

There is always something happening in this country and insurgency movements are not going to disappear. I have said this earlier, the communal flare-up idea creates a fear psychosis and works as auto-suggestion. Besides, this issue was establishment-created militancy. How will a delay help? According to the senior counsel:

the matter of judgement should be deferred so that religious, political and national leaders could try and work out a solution. He also said it was not a matter of just 10 or 20 parties in the case but related to lakhs and crores of people and the mediation could result in some way out.

Why did he file a case this late? How will a solution be worked out when the matter is subjudice? It has been 17 years and about nine months. No mediation has worked. And what is there to mediate about? This is not about lachs and crores of people; it is about the property. Once that has been determined, then there is scope for mediation. Whoever it belongs to will need to prove how the structure came up there, why it was demolished, why it resulted in large-scale riots and why nothing has been done.

Just putting it off by a few days is not going to change things. In fact, it will create tension, which is perhaps the whole intention. Nobody likes a quiet judgement where the parties will have to come to terms with the verdict and then act upon it in some concrete manner and answer the queries I have posed above and which have far greater ramifications than whose land it is.

Tripathi has not got the bureaucratic worm out of his system and is into prevaricating and file pushing.

The Supreme Court should have insisted that the Allahabad High Court go ahead and make the announcement. We are wasting time and resources on this and it appears to be a devious trick to keep the fire burning.