The Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991

The Act was passed in September 1991, in a period of intense public conflict over the site at Ayodhya, and its purpose is stated in its own preamble: to prohibit conversion of any place of worship and to provide for the maintenance of the religious character of any place of worship as it existed on the fifteenth day of August 1947.

Three sections do the work. Section 3 forbids the conversion of a place of worship of any religious denomination, or of any section of one, into a place of worship of a different denomination or section. Section 4(1) declares that the religious character of a place of worship as it existed on 15 August 1947 shall continue to be the same. Section 4(2) abates every suit, appeal or other proceeding pending before any court on that date concerning the conversion of the religious character of a place of worship, and bars any fresh proceeding.

The exceptions are set out in section 4(3) and section 5. Ancient and historical monuments and archaeological sites covered by the monuments legislation are outside the Act. So are disputes already settled, and conversions that took place by agreement or by decree before the commencement. And section 5 states that the Act does not apply to the place of worship commonly known as the Ram Janma Bhumi Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, or to any suit or proceeding relating to it.

The Act has been read two ways since it was passed, and both readings have been argued in court.

On the first, it is a statutory settlement of the kind a legislature makes to stop a class of dispute that cannot be resolved case by case without continuous conflict. On this view the date of independence is chosen as a line that is arbitrary in principle and defensible in practice, and the Act protects the secular character of the state by removing questions of historical grievance from the courts entirely.

On the second, it is an unconstitutional bar on access to justice. The argument is that section 4(2), by abating pending suits and barring fresh ones, removes the judicial remedy of parties who say they were dispossessed, and that a legislature cannot extinguish a cause of action of that kind without offending the constitutional guarantees of equality and of remedy.

The Supreme Court of India described the Act in 2019, in the judgment that resolved the Ayodhya title suit, in terms that treated it as an affirmation of the state's commitment to secularism, though the site itself was outside the Act by section 5. Petitions challenging its validity were filed the following year and the proceedings continue.

The atlas records the Act as in force, because it is, and records its constitutional standing as unsettled, because that is what a pending challenge means. It does not predict the outcome.