Former Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud on Tuesday said that his statement on deciding the Ayodhya Ram Janmabhoomi case was completely misconstrued and the entire thing did not even make it to social media. Earlier this year, Chandrachud courted quite the controversy when he said that he prayed to a deity for a solution to the Ayodhya dispute.
"Like everything else on social media, what I said has been misconstrued because what you say is then sort of compressed into a small short of 20 seconds and what you said on a particular occasion is then put forth in 20 seconds as your view, which is not so," the former CJI told news wire ANI in an interview.
He said that when he visited his village before retirement, a group of youngsters asked him how did he maintain his calm in the midst of conflict. While answering this question, Chandrachud said at the event that everyone has their own way of dealing with it.
To this, he said that his way of dealing with it is that he does prayer and meditation and that he never said that judges should not apply the Constitution while deciding cases.
"Even Ayodhya, the judgment tells you whether the Constitution was applied or was it some divine intervention that was appealed to." He explained that he said on that day that all judges work in areas of intense conflict throughout their professional lives.
Not only this, he also recounted how the judgement of the historic case was arrived at and that it was decided that the judgment would not be attributed to any SC judge. He said that the Ayodhya temple case had a history of several centuries behind it and was an issue that threatened to tear apart the social fabric of India.
"When we decided the case and we ultimately sat in conference, Chief Justice Gogoi was our Chief Justice at that time. A decision was taken consciously by all the judges together that there shall be no attribution of authorship to the judgment," he explained.
He added that this was done to send the message that everyone in the Supreme Court bench in the case stands together and speaks with one voice on the issue.
Moreover, ex-CJI Chandrachud mentioned that there is no issue when people comment on the judgments but when people troll judges for not catering to a section of the population while deciding cases.