New Delhi: The Supreme Court is slated to hear on Monday a clutch of petitions concerning the management of the revered Shri Banke Bihari Temple in Mathura-Vrindavan in the aftermath of the Uttar Pradesh government’s 2025 Ordinance.
As per the causelist published on the website of the apex court, a Bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi will take up the pleas, including the petition challenging the Uttar Pradesh government's recent Ordinance, which effectively takes over the management of the Shri Banke Bihari Temple, for hearing on August 4.
Last week, the Justice Kant-led Bench directed that the matter be placed before the Chief Justice of India (CJI), who will assign an appropriate Bench for hearing all related pleas together, after it was brought to the top court’s attention that a similar petition is already pending before a different Bench. One of the pleas contended that the Uttar Pradesh government's recent Ordinance amounts to state interference in religious affairs and that the temple is neither public property nor a state-owned trust.
The petitioners claimed that the temple has historically operated under a private management structure, as per a management scheme established in 1939. They further said that the Ordinance violates the provisions of that scheme and undermines the autonomy of the current temple management committee.
The plea further argues that there was no compelling reason for the state government to issue such an Ordinance, and that the government has offered no sufficient justification for taking over control of the temple’s administration. It said that the provisions of the Ordinance clearly infringes the right of the Haridasi Sampraday (or Sakhi Sampraday) to manage its own affairs in the matter of religion and right of members of the denomination to individually practise, profess and propagate their religion by seeking to alter the essential religious practices, rituals, customs and traditions which will have an effect of displeasing the deity and would make the entire denomination extinct.
“Section 5 (1)(i), 5 (i), 6(8) of the Ordinance directly violates Article 26(c) and (d) inasmuch as it permanently takes away the right of administration from the religious denomination altogether and vests it in non-denominational secular authority. Thus, in the cloak of better management, the Ordinance travelling beyond regulation has completely taken over the administration and management from the religious denomination and created a totally new body where the religious denomination has been reduced to redundancy,” said a plea filed by advocate Sankalp Goswami.
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